June 9, 2025 • 10 mins
Max and Tony explain how the power grid works, why inertia matters, and how batteries and renewables are changing everything. Learn about the duck curve, blackouts, and the future of clean energy — all in just ten minutes.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Ten Minute Climate, the podcastbrought to you by Beaverbrook Energy.
Join Max I am Max and Tony.
Hi, I'm Tony, who between themhave got over 70 years of experience
in the energy industryand they're here to share it with you.
It's everything you need to knowdelivered in just ten minutes.
So let's get started.
So the grid.
(00:20):
Let's hope, viewers, sitting comfortablybecause this is, this is a bit technical
and it's let's, let's,let's try and keep it at a high level.
Because to some extent,when you think about the grid,
you're thinking about lots of extensioncables plugged into each other.
But of course, it's it'sa hell of a lot more than that.
What it is is this mass distributed machine across the country that's delivering
(00:44):
exactly the power
at the voltageand average that we need at the moment.
We need it for this light, for thesemicrophones, for for whatever it is.
And that's unbelievably,it's an unbelievably big machine.
Probably all the grids together,
the biggest machinethat the humanity has ever made, a gas.
And it started with,you know, it's all about magnets,
(01:04):
big magnets, spinning, spinning magnetsnext to wires, fundamentally.
So, you know, thethe idea is that you actually the Faraday
principle about rotating magnetsin a, in a copper cage is fundamentally.
Well, yeah.
I mean, yeah, what you dois you're moving the electrons around,
but obviously down the other end,you've got like your mobile phone,
which needs exactly the right electronsat the right moment in the right way.
(01:28):
And you got to controlthose pretty carefully.
And that's, that's complicated. Yeah.
But that's, that'sjust the same as any other system.
And you know, they're the electricalequivalents of, valves and tanks.
And it's just the same as plumbing.
I mean, up upstream from that bit,
spinningyour magnets can take a lot of forms.
You can make a wheel go round with water,which is basically what hydro power is.
(01:51):
You can make a wheel go round with steam,which is a steam turbine,
which is what nuclear power stationsare actually reheating the water.
Yeah, they're doing various things.
The only difference in most powerstations is how you heat this,
the fluid up the steamor the or the gas or whatever
that makes the big magnetsgo round around decomposition.
Nuclear material generates heat,which makes steam burning coal burning
(02:15):
gas burning oil all generate steam,which makes the big fan go round about.
And this is why people got very worriedabout 20, 30 years ago.
They said,
oh, well, we're going to needwe're going to need
the big magnetic magnetspinning to keep the grid going.
Yeah, but if you're get to build
solar or wind, that's not going to work.
I mean, wind is big magnetsor smaller magnets going round,
(02:36):
but because of the nature of it,it's got stuff in between the means.
It doesn't deliver power in the same way.
So it's a totally different systemwith the energy transition.
Yeah.
Because if you if you go to alike a conventional power station,
you have the alternator bit at one end,which is a big lump of metal.
Don't get me wrong with the magnets on it,which goes round and round and round,
but attached to that, it's a hugegreat lump of metal, which is the turbine
(02:58):
which is turned round,which is more gas or whatever.
It's a jet engine.
It. Yeah, but it's massive,massive weight.
I mean, you know, hundreds,hundreds of tonnes of steel
rotating at very high speed,thousands of revolutions per minute.
And,
you can't replicatethat with a wind turbine because the whole
the bit in the nice cell of a wind turbineis actually quite small mechanically
(03:20):
compared to the the blades turning round,which gives you the rotation.
And as you say, what you used to getwas a flywheel effect
from these big lumps of metal, which meantthat as you got changes in the,
in the grid, in the amount of energyit's being taken or, or delivered,
the flywheel effectof all these big lumps of metal
(03:40):
going round around used to be steadying.
If you take those away,the grid becomes more volatile
in terms of controlling the voltageand the frequency.
So something happens somewhere.
These big wheels kind of slow it all down.
They calm everybody down.All right, boys? Yeah, come on down.
It's not turning super well.
It's like when you hit a hillwith your car.
(04:01):
You know,
if you don't put the accelerator downa little bit more, you'll slow down.
Was what you're saying isyou got up a grid and one power
station trips, and the other onesjust keep keeping everything going.
Yeah.
And when you got the flywheel effectof these big lumps of metal,
they can tend to carry you forward withthis mechanical energy, over that thump.
(04:21):
But if you haven't got thatinertia control in the grid,
everything goes up a bit and slows down.
And electrical,electrical things don't like that.
Yeah.
Because obviously the the frequencyand the voltage are really quite critical
for the operation of so many machinesand lighting and everything else.
And if they go
out of a very small controlled band,they switch off for safety purposes.
(04:45):
So you get almost a domino effect,a cascade effect
that something switches off,which makes something else switch off.
2003 it happened in North
America, and they lost what,50 million people got off the grid.
So there was a cascading seriesof blackouts from one fault,
and it just went boom,boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
We had a similar thing herea couple of years ago.
(05:08):
We lost a lot of the West Midlands.
So I think it was becausethe interconnector with France, because we
there's a big cable connects us to France,which has about two gigawatts
connection on,which is about three big power stations.
And it tripped.
So all of a sudden this load was thrown
onto the existing powerstations in the UK.
And they all went up and the voltageand frequency dropped sufficiently
(05:31):
in a certain area
of the UK that everything went dingding ding ding ding ding ding.
And he couldn't react fast enough then.
But what we've got now is batteries,which are really fast, instantaneous
I mean, not instantaneous millisecondbut yeah, mere milliseconds
quicker, quicker than you can speed upa turbine, quicker than you can put
more coal on the fire, quickerthan you can dump water down a mountain.
(05:53):
Exactly.
Batteries a bang on.
And that's what's balancing the grid.
And the fact that we're not interconnectedto other countries as well.
Yeah.
So those things keep spreadingthe load really is we'll be doing
what we're doing is not just relyingon the resilience of our grid now,
but we're connected to Ireland, Belgium,Norway, France.
There have been some instances where gridshave run with no fossil fuel at all,
(06:16):
and not for not for that long,but certainly for a couple of weeks
in Portugal did last year
various different, different other gridsor sections of the grid.
I think one in Australia
they'll run for certain periods of timewithout any fossils at all. It's
it's being shown that it can't be donebecause people were skipped the 1990s.
People said, no, no, you're always goingto have to have coal and gas, 34%.
I think we used to be quoted
(06:36):
that you had to have 34% of hydrocarbons,big spinning bits of metal,
otherwise nothing would ever operatein reality, don't need it.
And in fact, the Australians are investingmassively in grid
scale batteries because they've gotso much solar opportunity.
They're actually
building gigawatt scale batteries.
So, you know,bigger than a power station.
(06:59):
As more batteries become available,obviously the, the
this counterweight ideais going to be more studying for the grid.
Another strange term that comes into use
when you're talking aboutthe grid is ducks.
The duck curve. Yeah, the duck curve.
So it's it'sbasically solar sun comes up every day.
Pretty reliable.
(07:19):
Depends on something else.
But essentially, you know, when the solarpanels are going to be generating and
what happens is the duck curveactually refers to the price of power
that drops down like a duck's backand then comes up.
It comes back up in the, in the evening.
It's it's predictable, but,you know, that is going to come on.
But how do you what do you do in the,
(07:40):
in the morning, in the eveningwhen you do have solar
and the in the morning,not very much because it's dark
and it's been a long time since the sun.
But the eveningyou can shift batteries there.
And that's happeningenormously in California.
They've got a huge, buildout of batteries,
and it's materially changing the profile
of when solar comes on the systemand pricing as well.
(08:00):
So if you've got this
curve
which is being changed, it's changingsliced.
Yeah. Slicing the duck. Yeah.
That's going to mean thatthe pricing of a of power
is going to be
on a time scale,which doesn't necessarily currently relate
to the way we use energy,where you are currently a massive problem
(08:21):
because you're generating all your solarduring the day. Yeah.
So the price goes to zerobecause you've got in many cases too much.
Yeah. And particularly in Spainthey're generating way too much.
They have to shut it down.
You're getting,you know, literally a few,
a few euros a megawatt hourand you should be getting 30 or 40 or so.
So yeah, shifting to the eveningis shifting the evenings.
Well, it can happen.
I don't think it's going to changethe working day necessarily, but
(08:44):
it's going to it's going to move powerfrom the middle to the engine to,
to, to, to to the evening, which enablesthe solar farms to make more money,
which means they're economic.
It's currently
if you build a solar farm in Spain,
you don't make any moneybecause you're selling it
in the day for a few years,so no one's building it.
So you've got to build it with batteries.
So you're getting the evening pricing,which is always higher because there's
(09:04):
greater demand for electricity generallyand there's no solar.
So you need to move it.
But would it make senseif you got a high intensity?
High energy
intensity processyou start doing at 4:00 in the morning
when the sun comes up in Californiaor 6:00 in the morning, whatever it is.
And then you stop doing it at 6:00at night, whereas at the moment
(09:25):
the working daytends to start between sort of eight nine
and finishesbetween sort of five and seven.
Yeah, it does, but industrial processesmean, you know, there's tend to run
as much as you want as much as possible.
If you get a bill of factory.
Yeah,you want to use it as much as possible.
But I think it's an interesting questionbecause in certain places
you're going to be getting very, very lowelectricity prices and sunny places
(09:48):
where when you've got long days,
you're going to get very cheap pricesat certain times.
And will it make sense to build factoriesto use them?
Only some of the time when energyis very cheap, at some point it's
going to be at some point in thein the cost benefit curve.
It's going to beworth building two factories
or double the size factory which you own.
(10:09):
You're on for half the timebecause of the energy cost.
A lot of people saying,yeah, yeah, to be convinced.
Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode.
If you enjoyed the conversation,don't forget to like, subscribe
and leave us a review!
It really helps us grow and continuebringing you valuable content.
If you're curious
to learn more about Beaverbrook Energyand how we're navigating the future
(10:29):
of energy,feel free to reach out to us directly.
And for those looking for quick,actionable insights on the energy
transition, be sure to subscribeto our ten second climate newsletter,
delivered every weekend
with a central intelligence to helpbusiness leaders stay ahead of the curve.
We appreciate you listening,
and we look forward to having youjoin us again next time.
Stay informed, stay engaged and take care.
Welcome to Ten Minute Climate, the podcastbrought to you by Beaverbrook Energy.
Join Max I am Max and Tony.
Hi, I'm Tony, who between themhave got over 70 years of experience
in the energy industryand they're here to share it with you.
It's everything you need to knowdelivered in just ten minutes.
So let's get started.
So the grid.
(00:20):
Let's hope, viewers, sitting comfortablybecause this is, this is a bit technical
and it's let's, let's,let's try and keep it at a high level.
Because to some extent,when you think about the grid,
you're thinking about lots of extensioncables plugged into each other.
But of course, it's it'sa hell of a lot more than that.
What it is is this mass distributed machine across the country that's delivering
(00:44):
exactly the power
at the voltageand average that we need at the moment.
We need it for this light, for thesemicrophones, for for whatever it is.
And that's unbelievably,it's an unbelievably big machine.
Probably all the grids together,
the biggest machinethat the humanity has ever made, a gas.
And it started with,you know, it's all about magnets,
(01:04):
big magnets, spinning, spinning magnetsnext to wires, fundamentally.
So, you know, thethe idea is that you actually the Faraday
principle about rotating magnetsin a, in a copper cage is fundamentally.
Well, yeah.
I mean, yeah, what you dois you're moving the electrons around,
but obviously down the other end,you've got like your mobile phone,
which needs exactly the right electronsat the right moment in the right way.
(01:28):
And you got to controlthose pretty carefully.
And that's, that's complicated. Yeah.
But that's, that'sjust the same as any other system.
And you know, they're the electricalequivalents of, valves and tanks.
And it's just the same as plumbing.
I mean, up upstream from that bit,
spinningyour magnets can take a lot of forms.
You can make a wheel go round with water,which is basically what hydro power is.
(01:51):
You can make a wheel go round with steam,which is a steam turbine,
which is what nuclear power stationsare actually reheating the water.
Yeah, they're doing various things.
The only difference in most powerstations is how you heat this,
the fluid up the steamor the or the gas or whatever
that makes the big magnetsgo round around decomposition.
Nuclear material generates heat,which makes steam burning coal burning
(02:15):
gas burning oil all generate steam,which makes the big fan go round about.
And this is why people got very worriedabout 20, 30 years ago.
They said,
oh, well, we're going to needwe're going to need
the big magnetic magnetspinning to keep the grid going.
Yeah, but if you're get to build
solar or wind, that's not going to work.
I mean, wind is big magnetsor smaller magnets going round,
(02:36):
but because of the nature of it,it's got stuff in between the means.
It doesn't deliver power in the same way.
So it's a totally different systemwith the energy transition.
Yeah.
Because if you if you go to alike a conventional power station,
you have the alternator bit at one end,which is a big lump of metal.
Don't get me wrong with the magnets on it,which goes round and round and round,
but attached to that, it's a hugegreat lump of metal, which is the turbine
(02:58):
which is turned round,which is more gas or whatever.
It's a jet engine.
It. Yeah, but it's massive,massive weight.
I mean, you know, hundreds,hundreds of tonnes of steel
rotating at very high speed,thousands of revolutions per minute.
And,
you can't replicatethat with a wind turbine because the whole
the bit in the nice cell of a wind turbineis actually quite small mechanically
(03:20):
compared to the the blades turning round,which gives you the rotation.
And as you say, what you used to getwas a flywheel effect
from these big lumps of metal, which meantthat as you got changes in the,
in the grid, in the amount of energyit's being taken or, or delivered,
the flywheel effectof all these big lumps of metal
(03:40):
going round around used to be steadying.
If you take those away,the grid becomes more volatile
in terms of controlling the voltageand the frequency.
So something happens somewhere.
These big wheels kind of slow it all down.
They calm everybody down.All right, boys? Yeah, come on down.
It's not turning super well.
It's like when you hit a hillwith your car.
(04:01):
You know,
if you don't put the accelerator downa little bit more, you'll slow down.
Was what you're saying isyou got up a grid and one power
station trips, and the other onesjust keep keeping everything going.
Yeah.
And when you got the flywheel effectof these big lumps of metal,
they can tend to carry you forward withthis mechanical energy, over that thump.
(04:21):
But if you haven't got thatinertia control in the grid,
everything goes up a bit and slows down.
And electrical,electrical things don't like that.
Yeah.
Because obviously the the frequencyand the voltage are really quite critical
for the operation of so many machinesand lighting and everything else.
And if they go
out of a very small controlled band,they switch off for safety purposes.
(04:45):
So you get almost a domino effect,a cascade effect
that something switches off,which makes something else switch off.
2003 it happened in North
America, and they lost what,50 million people got off the grid.
So there was a cascading seriesof blackouts from one fault,
and it just went boom,boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
We had a similar thing herea couple of years ago.
(05:08):
We lost a lot of the West Midlands.
So I think it was becausethe interconnector with France, because we
there's a big cable connects us to France,which has about two gigawatts
connection on,which is about three big power stations.
And it tripped.
So all of a sudden this load was thrown
onto the existing powerstations in the UK.
And they all went up and the voltageand frequency dropped sufficiently
(05:31):
in a certain area
of the UK that everything went dingding ding ding ding ding ding.
And he couldn't react fast enough then.
But what we've got now is batteries,which are really fast, instantaneous
I mean, not instantaneous millisecondbut yeah, mere milliseconds
quicker, quicker than you can speed upa turbine, quicker than you can put
more coal on the fire, quickerthan you can dump water down a mountain.
(05:53):
Exactly.
Batteries a bang on.
And that's what's balancing the grid.
And the fact that we're not interconnectedto other countries as well.
Yeah.
So those things keep spreadingthe load really is we'll be doing
what we're doing is not just relyingon the resilience of our grid now,
but we're connected to Ireland, Belgium,Norway, France.
There have been some instances where gridshave run with no fossil fuel at all,
(06:16):
and not for not for that long,but certainly for a couple of weeks
in Portugal did last year
various different, different other gridsor sections of the grid.
I think one in Australia
they'll run for certain periods of timewithout any fossils at all. It's
it's being shown that it can't be donebecause people were skipped the 1990s.
People said, no, no, you're always goingto have to have coal and gas, 34%.
I think we used to be quoted
(06:36):
that you had to have 34% of hydrocarbons,big spinning bits of metal,
otherwise nothing would ever operatein reality, don't need it.
And in fact, the Australians are investingmassively in grid
scale batteries because they've gotso much solar opportunity.
They're actually
building gigawatt scale batteries.
So, you know,bigger than a power station.
(06:59):
As more batteries become available,obviously the, the
this counterweight ideais going to be more studying for the grid.
Another strange term that comes into use
when you're talking aboutthe grid is ducks.
The duck curve. Yeah, the duck curve.
So it's it'sbasically solar sun comes up every day.
Pretty reliable.
(07:19):
Depends on something else.
But essentially, you know, when the solarpanels are going to be generating and
what happens is the duck curveactually refers to the price of power
that drops down like a duck's backand then comes up.
It comes back up in the, in the evening.
It's it's predictable, but,you know, that is going to come on.
But how do you what do you do in the,
(07:40):
in the morning, in the eveningwhen you do have solar
and the in the morning,not very much because it's dark
and it's been a long time since the sun.
But the eveningyou can shift batteries there.
And that's happeningenormously in California.
They've got a huge, buildout of batteries,
and it's materially changing the profile
of when solar comes on the systemand pricing as well.
(08:00):
So if you've got this
curve
which is being changed, it's changingsliced.
Yeah. Slicing the duck. Yeah.
That's going to mean thatthe pricing of a of power
is going to be
on a time scale,which doesn't necessarily currently relate
to the way we use energy,where you are currently a massive problem
(08:21):
because you're generating all your solarduring the day. Yeah.
So the price goes to zerobecause you've got in many cases too much.
Yeah. And particularly in Spainthey're generating way too much.
They have to shut it down.
You're getting,you know, literally a few,
a few euros a megawatt hourand you should be getting 30 or 40 or so.
So yeah, shifting to the eveningis shifting the evenings.
Well, it can happen.
I don't think it's going to changethe working day necessarily, but
(08:44):
it's going to it's going to move powerfrom the middle to the engine to,
to, to, to to the evening, which enablesthe solar farms to make more money,
which means they're economic.
It's currently
if you build a solar farm in Spain,
you don't make any moneybecause you're selling it
in the day for a few years,so no one's building it.
So you've got to build it with batteries.
So you're getting the evening pricing,which is always higher because there's
(09:04):
greater demand for electricity generallyand there's no solar.
So you need to move it.
But would it make senseif you got a high intensity?
High energy
intensity processyou start doing at 4:00 in the morning
when the sun comes up in Californiaor 6:00 in the morning, whatever it is.
And then you stop doing it at 6:00at night, whereas at the moment
(09:25):
the working daytends to start between sort of eight nine
and finishesbetween sort of five and seven.
Yeah, it does, but industrial processesmean, you know, there's tend to run
as much as you want as much as possible.
If you get a bill of factory.
Yeah,you want to use it as much as possible.
But I think it's an interesting questionbecause in certain places
you're going to be getting very, very lowelectricity prices and sunny places
(09:48):
where when you've got long days,
you're going to get very cheap pricesat certain times.
And will it make sense to build factoriesto use them?
Only some of the time when energyis very cheap, at some point it's
going to be at some point in thein the cost benefit curve.
It's going to beworth building two factories
or double the size factory which you own.
(10:09):
You're on for half the timebecause of the energy cost.
A lot of people saying,yeah, yeah, to be convinced.
Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode.
If you enjoyed the conversation,don't forget to like, subscribe
and leave us a review!
It really helps us grow and continuebringing you valuable content.
If you're curious
to learn more about Beaverbrook Energyand how we're navigating the future
(10:29):
of energy,feel free to reach out to us directly.
And for those looking for quick,actionable insights on the energy
transition, be sure to subscribeto our ten second climate newsletter,
delivered every weekend
with a central intelligence to helpbusiness leaders stay ahead of the curve.
We appreciate you listening,
and we look forward to having youjoin us again next time.
Stay informed, stay engaged and take care.
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