Ep. 30: Jürgen Mayerhofer, CEO & Co‑Founder of Enspired – Battery Optimization, AI and the Software‑Defined Energy World

0:11 欢迎收听 Smart Charge by RiDERgy 播客。我是 Claudio Geyken,RiDERgy 的创始人兼首席执行官。这是你学习有关电动汽车和车队能源管理和智能充电创新的节目。

0:39 欢迎回到 Smart Charge。今天我们邀请到 Jurgen Meyerhofer,Inspired 的创始人兼首席执行官,一家电池储能优化公司。Jurgen 的职业道路从奥地利天然气市场自由化的早期开始，想想著名的 Baumgarten 节点、容量预订和真实物理，到今天由软件驱动的电力市场,电池实时调度。我们深入探讨日内交易的实际操作。仅德国每天就有超过 1000 万次价格更新,叠加日前、日内和辅助服务,而真正困难的部分是最后一公里的自动化:

1:22 将 EMS 连接到一个可以预测、决策和逐个 15 分钟调度的交易平台，每天有 96 个产品。Jurgen 解释了 Inspired 如何通过 EMS 连接到电池,优化 100 兆瓦级项目,以及为什么如果你尊重位置、电网影响并为完全自动化而非手动操作而建造,电池可以在没有补贴的情况下运作。如果你关心将储能转化为盈利且支持电网的资源,这期节目就是你的实战指南。我也非常自豪 Jurgen 同时担任 RiDERgy 的顾问。

1:58 让我们开始吧。你好 Jurgen,今天怎么样?嗨 Claudio,很好，谢谢邀请我。是的,很高兴有你,也很高兴更多地了解你和 Inspired。所以让我们先从你开始。我知道你在能源领域已经有相当长的背景。起源是什么，你是什么时候知道这是你想工作的领域的?如果你只用一两分钟来介绍你的背景,你职业生涯中的关键步骤是什么?

2:31 好的,我从哪里开始呢?首先,我一直对计算机科学非常感兴趣,所以我很清楚要在这个领域工作。我申请了很多不同的工作,我会说没有任何明确的目标。然后偶然间我进入了一家，现在你会称之为初创公司,对吧?那时它只是

3:05 一家小公司，我作为第 18 号员工加入。那是 2002 年,当时奥地利天然气市场自由化,所以我们从传真信息来提名天然气进口,转变为通过电子邮件发送精美的 Excel 电子表格，同时仍被称为非常著名的 KISS 格式。这就是我偶然进入能源市场的方式。所以实际上我的背景是天然气物流,如果你想这样称呼的话。

3:42 我的第一个较大项目是编写算法来优化物理天然气流，包括压缩机站、进口和出口。那时是节点系统,对吧?电力市场现在有很多关于节点定价的讨论，这就是天然气的运作方式,大约 25 年前。当我发现我真的在移动物理天然气时,管道沿着我回家必须

4:15 经过的高速公路,我经过压缩机站时,我实际上想:这很酷,因为软件产生了物理影响,我知道那里在物理上发生了什么。所以你当时管理天然气流,就像你现在管理电力流一样。是的,实际上开始真的是 Baumgarten 的进口，那是奥地利的一个著名节点,我们从斯洛伐克进口,所以那时主要是 Gazprom 的天然气。奥地利石油和天然气巨头 OMV,

4:48 我认为是第一个与 Gazprom 签订长期合同的公司。然后那些天然气通过各种管道分配到德国、匈牙利、意大利,你必须在那里预订不同质量的容量，这也是电力市场的话题,所以坚定或可中断的容量等等。然后你真的必须考虑物理:天然气的不同热值,高热值和低热值。那时我们有所谓的

5:24 不同的天然气日。在控制区域，DSO 的等效物，我们有 0 到 0,基本上是日历日。在运输方面我们有 6 到 6,对于进口我们使用 8 到 8 点的时间表,我们必须把所有这些整合在一起,而德国的同事使用以千瓦时计算的日历日，所以不需要处理热值

5:56 和所有那些。但天然气确实有质量维度,不像电力。这就是能源背景。你也有一点创业的一面,你能强调一些导致你创立 Inspired 的里程碑,从创业角度来说。我总是倾向于在小型创新公司工作，不是因为我选择了它们;我认为它们

6:30 更多是选择我作为它们的员工。从第一家自由化天然气市场的公司,到成为自由职业者帮助客户在欧洲市场进入,到为短期电力交易做咨询，我的整个职业生涯都是由软件和能源领域的创新驱动的,并且幸运的是总是在我可以做很多决策和承担很多责任的角色中,比如我之前作为董事总经理的角色。

7:07 在 Visotec。那时是一家超小的奥地利公司,在 2.5 年内有机地扩展到整个欧洲,所以背后没有投资者等等。所以过去承担风险有相当多的回报,这样说吧。所以我认为没有一次我们做更大的战略举动时失败了。所以我现在敲木头,但到目前为止我们对大胆的

7:41 举动有很好的直觉。我认为这也给了我们创立 Inspired 的信心。加入 Inspired 的第一批人,我们一起工作过,我们看到了我们所做的是有效的。每个人都清楚他或她在组织中的角色,所以我会说这是 20 年经验的自然结果,做我们现在在 Inspired 做的事情。是的,这很吸引人。你在多大程度上将你的上一次

8:15 与Viso到Inspired的经验?可以说,你现在也在利用的基石是什么?我认为我们在那里学到的一个主题是可扩展性。很容易迷失在追逐令人兴奋的机会中。这里一个小项目,那里一个小项目。但扩大公司规模需要很长时间。可扩展性的另一个方面是:如果你是有机增长,你总是处于先签下一个客户的模式中,好的,现在我有足够的钱

8:55 再招两个人,我必须签下下一个项目。理论上你总是落后的。如果你真的想大胆一点,看到即将到来的机会,想提前投资,那么以有机的方式做到这一点真的很难,除非你已经是一家大公司,手头有钱,然后投资进去。但如果你从零开始,自力更生地有机增长,我认为你会

9:24 在某些市场上太慢了,当你想到人工智能的进步,当你想到电池储能正在发生什么,或者能源行业总体发展得有多快。我来自一个时代,那时一切都需要数年时间,能源行业没有人着急。没有关于能源转型的讨论。没有波动性,什么都没有。这是一个非常稳定、受监管的行业,现在我感觉恰恰

9:56 相反。监管跟不上,现有企业有时在速度上有点挣扎。所以我们吸取了很多经验教训,在某种意义上也有我们想避免的事情。我们也学到了什么是不那么明智的。例如,我们曾经是一家奥地利公司,所有内容都是德语，内部文档、电子邮件、合同,无论什么。如果你在销售方面进行地理扩展,这是一个问题,如果你

10:33 入职第一个不会说德语的员工,这也是一个问题。所以你要么限制自己说,抱歉,只允许说德语的人,然后你会错过很多优秀人才,要么你从根本上以不同的方式做这件事。这是我们在Inspired从第一天就做的事情，一切都是英语,所有合同都是英语。我们宁愿以另一种方式挣扎。德国客户要求德语合同,我们就想,天哪,我们没有,

11:00 即使作为一家奥地利公司。所以有些事情进行得很顺利,比如专注于可扩展性和它需要什么,还有其他事情我们只是学到了,因为过去我们的设置方式非常麻烦。所以我认为这是不同经验的良好结合。很好。说到软件、语言、文化和扩展,我很想听听你的意见。因为

11:30 我们也处于人工智能时代,美国建立了大量成功的公司,从互联网时代开始，软件公司，而我们在欧洲似乎与美国、中国和其他一些地区相比有所挣扎。而你是一家在国际上成功的软件公司的杰出例子,能够在欧洲开发出顶尖的软件。你对此有什么看法,是什么

12:03 让你乐观地认为欧洲也能扭转局面?你将欧洲的这种弱势归因于什么,为什么没有更多像Inspired这样的公司?我认为有不少这样的公司。我们面临的问题是,在扩展方面,我们在某个时候遇到了某种玻璃天花板。我认为在欧洲,创业精神仍然没有被认为是非常有价值的。

12:38 我们仍然依赖于几十年前建立的知名品牌,现在是大公司。我认为在欧洲获得早期融资到某个阶段是相当不错的,但如果你真的想扩大业务,通常会有来自美国、亚洲等地的投资者参与。所以我认为我们有人才,我们有技术,但我们就是不够勇敢或大胆。我的意思是,你

13:08 现在可以挑战我说,是什么阻止你筹集5亿欧元并全力以赴?这不是愿景的问题，而是资本的问题。其他公司基于愿景烧掉数十亿欧元,而这些公司通常位于欧洲以外。这些是受人钦佩的公司。我认为一方面是融资问题,另一方面是文化问题。一切

13:40 都运作得很好,对吧?汽车行业，但没有人回想,我的意思是,他们也是从小开始的,现在他们已经成熟了。我认为在资本、有时是监管方面,有时只是来自政治家、其他行业等的认可方面,没有足够的支持。所以这是我的看法。我知道这是一个非常高层次的看法,但我认为如果有人说,"嘿,Jürgen,你想要2亿来完全疯狂地发展吗"

14:14 在全球范围内,我们会知道如何花这笔钱,对吧?我很确定。好的。所以我很期待。你已经完成了B轮融资。显然,你可能不会停留在那里,我们会回到这个话题。在我们继续深入了解Inspired及你们所做的事情之前,还有一点，回到我们刚才提出的观点:在你看来，我们经常谈论能源世界的去中心化,但在我看来

14:43 我们对能源世界的软件定义及这些变化谈论得不够。我们谈论移动性,因为我们处于移动性和能源的交汇点,软件定义车辆的概念总是一次又一次地出现。我觉得在能源世界,我们对它向软件定义的能源世界转型的讨论也不够。我很想听听你对此的看法。我的意思是,我们所做的一切都是软件,

15:09 对吧?一切都是自动化的,所以从算法上线那一刻起就不需要人工干预，从自动再训练,到优化参数,到适应基本面情况。老实说,我认为这将是唯一的方式,因为去中心化的小资产在调度和管理上与中心化的大资产有根本性的不同,对吧?我认为传统企业非常擅长管理他们的大型资产组合,但我们

15:47 看到的是,作为能源行业整体,我们在去中心化设置方面就是缺乏执行能力,对吧?从智能电表开始，我甚至不会把那里需要的东西称为软件，从智能电表的部署到表后优化,这些都还处于非常初级的阶段,对吧?我家里有所有这些花哨的设置,从电动汽车到充电桩到储能电池到热泵,等等,但这些解决方案在现实中远未达到幻灯片上展示的水平。

16:26 不幸的是。所以我认为在软件和技术上的关注远远不够。现在还是:买这个电池,安装好,就完事了。我认为这遗漏了相当多的潜力。当然你还有传统世界在一定程度上拖我们后腿,对吧?因为从政治角度我看到在常规电厂等方面也有不同的方向选择。所以我认为一些利益相关者还困在他们

17:02 几十年来熟悉的旧世界里,这就回到了之前的问题,对吧?如果他们在技术上敢于冒险,就应该在人工智能、能源科技公司等方面有更多的投资。但我认为他们还没有意识到这一点,因为传统企业告诉他们,"伙计们,一切都好，建几个吉瓦的什么电厂,我们就能用老办法解决问题,"这是对的,对吧?过去这招管用,为什么现在不管用呢?

17:31 但你只需要忽略能源转型和所有其他事情就行了。所以我认为将会获胜的是那些具有良好软件能力的参与者。谢谢。现在我想做一个也许会很有趣的练习。除了建立Inspired之外,你最令人印象深刻的一点是你还是五个孩子的父亲。你怎么向你的孩子们解释Inspired?如果你必须用简单的方式、简短的方式来解释，爸爸是做什么的?

18:05 最简单的就是当我们在车里的时候,对吧，在奥地利我们有相当多的风电场。我总是告诉他们,我们从那个风电场取出电力,储存起来,然后在需要的时候输送出去,这样灯就能亮着。这是给四岁孩子的说法,对吧?我当然给他们看过我们项目的图片，我们优化的100兆瓦，然后

18:34 他们会惊讶于电池竟然能那么大,对吧?他们仍然，你知道,他们是孩子，想到的是他们玩具里的那些小东西,那是他们世界里的电池。但这是最简单的方式,对吧?有一些实体的东西,因为基本上不可能描述一个软件平台或完全自动化，那没有任何意义。但如果你有一个实体的风电场,开车时经过,然后给他们看一张电池的图片,说你只是把电

19:01 储存起来,稍后再释放出来,他们很可能就能理解了。不错。我喜欢这个。那你怎么向能源专家,一个非常了解这个行业的人简短地解释Inspired?那么我通常会解释说,我们是储能电池的商业优化器,对吧?所以我们通过EMS与我们的平台连接,另一端连接到所有市场，包括批发市场和辅助服务，通过我们的全自动化

19:34 设置,负责中间所有的预测和竞价决策,目标是为资产所有者创造最大收益。大概是这样，通常还会有后续问题。确实,这也很好地引出了后续问题。那么在价值流方面,与Inspired之前进行的传统交易相比,有什么新的洞察呢?

20:06 在那个时代，你会怎么说?你会怎么比较?我会说在之前的时代,我也在那里工作过，我参与过联合循环燃气轮机等等，重点非常放在长期上,放在对资产的非常详细的建模上。你不会知道对于燃气轮机的现货优化需要做什么,需要考虑什么,从爬坡到温度到其他一切。所以我认为

20:41 过去几十年真的是专注于资产的技术细节及其优化。我认为这就是我们看到机会的地方,因为当我们问传统企业,"你们在优化灵活性吗?"他们会说,"当然。"但他们的意思是,他们优化了它,把它投标到日前拍卖中,然后就去吃午饭了。这就是当时的灵活性优化,这并没有错，它

21:14 确实是灵活性优化。但到那时为止,你只需要非常擅长优化你的资产:得到你的调度,得到你的影子价格和所有那些东西,你的PFC,你投标,就完成了。然后你告诉电厂的人,"明天这么做",基于刚刚在日前拍卖中中标的结果。但最后一公里在日内和实时调度方面要复杂得多。所以,从

21:46 两个方面来说，对于调度电厂来说,当它还不是完全自动化时,仍然有人坐在那里或多或少地拨动操纵杆，这是一个变革管理的话题,要说服那些每天只爬坡一次的人,让他们现在按照15分钟的时间表进行调度,并在他们做了三十年同样的事情之后向他们解释这一点。然后是你需要的软件能力。我的意思是,

22:16 市面上确实有一些工具,但如果你想真正做到出类拔萃,一个标准工具是无法给你带来竞争优势的,因为其他所有人也都购买了同样的标准工具。所以我认为,对于相当多的老牌企业来说,这种运营模式的转变仍然非常棘手，突然之间,灵活性优化的最后一公里有了很大的价值,而你需要软件和技术来实现它。

22:44 还有自动化流程。所以我认为这是根本性的不同,这也是我们切入市场的地方,我们认为有机会做得比老牌企业更好,因为我们不必在其他领域竞争，他们已经做了几十年,他们知道自己在做什么。那么,也许为了听众的理解:我们正在讨论你试图解决的，或者说你已经解决的，根本问题,那就是

23:16 企业无法自动控制任何资产。这是一个重要维度,另一个则是能够对更多市场信号做出反应,并更好地预测这些市场信号应该如何与资产互动。如果我理解错了请纠正我,但你可以这样称呼它,对吧?因为你提到的新信号,例如,日内价格变化，在德国每天有超过1000万次更新

23:56 有人必须监听它们,而肯定不是人类，我是说,你可以试试看，但这需要技术才能非常高效地处理。我认为这就是优化灵活资产,特别是柔性资产的范式转变。是的。这个机会，也许先打下一些基础，有现货市场,由日前和日内市场组成

24:28 你的价格通常是一个结果，并且受到可再生能源波动性的影响更大，是15分钟时段内供需的结果。这是你做的一种优化。而且我认为你们还参与平衡服务市场,也就是输电系统运营商，电网试图保持流经不同电缆的容量在

24:59 任何时候都稳定在50赫兹。在输电系统运营商内部，因为我确信我们会使用这些术语，有不同的市场:有非常短期的FCR,然后有稍长期的aFRR,这些是需要区分的。我甚至会说,你提到的所有市场在某种意义上都是平衡市场,因为批发市场的最大区别是你在交付前交易，所以我们

25:31 现在就可以为今晚甚至明天进行交易,所有30分钟产品和明天的96个时段。这是，如果我们以德国为例，市场模式的一部分,你被要求交易出你的可再生能源增量,也就是更新。所以如果在某个时间点,接近交付时,你发现,"天哪,光伏发电比预期的多或少,或者风电比预期的多",那么你必须交易

26:00 差异。这算是一种预平衡。如果跳过这一步，就像过去那样，你就必须承担昨天在日前拍卖中的预测与实际发生情况之间的全部偏差,而辅助服务则在15分钟的交付期内发生。所以输电系统运营商会说，或者频率是自动化的，"这是我在电网上看到的情况。我需要资产来帮我。"

26:29 对,如果光伏发电量比哪怕半小时前预期的还少,如果有电厂故障，但我认为你描述的整个过程都有助于平衡电网,对吧,无论是在交付之前还是交付期间,都更接近实时。而你们参与所有这些环节，你说对,当然。这可以说是储能电池的创新之处,对吧?如果回顾4年前,电池都在频率遏制备用中

27:02 ，也就是你提到的FCR，可以说这相当容易管理,因为现场有频率控制器测量现场频率,如果电网中电力过多你就充电,反之亦然,对吧?所以这是一种相当被动的服务。没有什么创造性的竞标策略之类的。而在过去4年里,这已经转变为一个完整的算法优化问题,对吧,试图找到如何以及在哪里参与的最优解

27:37 你们的储能电池。非常有趣。从地理上讲,你们的解决方案有限制吗?所以我理解我们现在谈论的都是自由化市场。所以任何仍处于旧世界的市场，即1997年之前的欧洲，我不太确定美国的确切情况,或者所有国家自由化电力市场的历史是怎样的。但你们是否受到那些

28:09 尚未自由化的国家的限制?是的,准确地说，为了让我们的软件,或者说实际上是我们的服务,对吧,因为你还能获得市场路径,不仅仅是，所以我们不授权软件,而是提供全套服务。理想情况下,你应该有由输电系统运营商组织的辅助服务或平衡市场,这通常是常见的,加上一个流动性好的批发市场,或者像荷兰或丹麦等的不平衡市场。所以

28:47 有多个收入来源。如果你有一个以FCR为主导的国家,对吧,而且没有批发市场,你可以使用我们的软件,但与现有企业相比,它不会提供太大的提升,对吧?所以这对我们进入该市场来说是个危险信号,因为我们只在能增加更多价值时才进入。所以欧洲总体上很合适。我们也正在与

29:19 合作伙伴进入日本市场，很快会有公告。美国通过独立系统运营商以不同方式组织,按5分钟粒度,但也可行。澳大利亚也一样。但我不会说每个国家都适合，地球上有200多个国家,对吧?所以我们需要一定的自由化市场基础设施，一个流动性池和不同的服务;否则优化问题不够大,不需要我们。但比方说,举一个例子

29:55 我认为在西方世界中总是讨论不足,但却像其他任何因素一样塑造着能源转型的话题:Inspire在中国会如何使用?或者说这有可能吗?我认为理论上是可以的。上次我和某人谈这个话题,大概是3-4周前,我还不清楚现货市场是否已经完全建立并对第三方开放等等，而这些正是我们需要使用的东西,对吧。所以市场必须

30:28 实现自由化,并允许第三方参与者平等接入。但如果是这样的话,中国会是其中之一。只是我还没有听到有人说"嘿伙计们,中国已经具备你们需要的一切了",对吧?我认为正在朝那个方向发展。再举个例子，我在Inspire之前就已经和印度电力交易所有过联系,因为他们当时正在建立现货市场。所以我认为有一些国家正在这方面崛起

31:03 ，他们会研究哪些市场模式在其他地区被证明是成功的,并以此为依据,对吧?他们不会照搬,但会说"好的,这些特性是有效的,是合理的"。这些是实物产品,对吧?是电网频率，基本上在每个国家都是一样的,即使你用的是60赫兹而不是50赫兹等等。基本概念是相同的,对吧?所以

31:35 没有限制，可以说监管成熟度或自由化成熟度是我们进入那里的限制因素。你对能源世界未来走向的愿景是什么，我说的是真正的全世界，我们会在未来比如说40年内实现100%可再生能源,即风能、太阳能和电池,然后有越来越多的自由化,以及像Inspire这样的优化吗?老实说,我希望会更快,但是

32:12 我认为不仅仅是关于可再生能源和电池，当然这是一个非常好的组合。但取决于当前的发电结构,对吧,最初的目标是脱碳,对吧?所以首先淘汰最脏的那些。我认为在一些市场中,天然气仍然有其作用,例如,作为我们达到更高可再生能源渗透率之前的一个解决方案,因为我们在一些市场如西班牙或

32:45 ERCOT等地看到的是,电网基础设施可能还没有完全准备好迎接100%的可再生能源渗透。所以我们首先看到构网型设置等等,我们也看到很多关于协同部署的讨论,但更多的是讨论而不是真正的推广。所以我认为我们也必须给电网一些时间来跟上例如光伏和电池推广的速度。但是的,最终我认为应该是可行的。我们还缺少长

33:20 时储能。作为一个奥地利人我有点偏见,对吧?我们有很多抽水蓄能,所以我们没有那么大的问题,但其他国家没有机会直接建造抽水蓄能。而且需要相当长的时间。所以我认为长时储能是达到100%可再生能源世界的缺失部分,但在大多数市场中还没有激励机制。而且在商业上不可行,所以很多长时储能项目

33:51 都是出于供应安全的考虑而建造的,我想说。这就是为什么它们中的许多是国有的或由国家控制的。所以我认为还缺少一些东西来使其在商业上具有吸引力。你最好的猜测是什么，如果你必须猜测，可再生能源一到两天波动性的长期解决方案会是什么?我的意思是,每个国家都

34:23 有点不同,但让我们特别以欧洲大陆为例,德国,我们已经达到60%的可再生能源,并且正在快速迈向100%。我们会需要氢能吗?我们会安装更多的电池,因为它们会变得如此便宜,以至于拥有两周的电池备份实际上是经济的?还是更多的互联互通，实际上Redefining Energy播客和其他人正在谈论

34:53 在加拿大和欧洲之间建设线路的计划。不同国家之间的一些互联互通,互联线路。是的,我认为确实有一些跨洲电缆的计划等等,但这些都是巨大的基础设施项目。我不知道会有多快。我不是电池化学方面的专家。我不知道你能把持续时间推到多远,哪个会是最具成本效益的。也许我们会被其他技术惊喜到,比如

35:29 液流电池,对吧，它们已经存在了相当长的时间,但从未找到它们的最佳位置。里面有可生物降解的材料等等,所以它们甚至会比传统的磷酸铁锂电池更可持续。所以也许长时储能LDES会找到它的最佳位置。有很多压缩空气等方面的实验。我认为一旦市场出现所谓的"黑暗无风期",也许输电系统运营商会

36:06 采购长时储能等等,然后商业上最具竞争力的解决方案就会获胜,对吧?无论是压缩空气还是液流电池或其他什么。所以我对单一技术没有很大的押注。我只是不太喜欢氢能，用风能生产它,损失效率,运输它,损失效率,再气化,损失效率,燃烧它,又损失效率。所以如果你是氢能爱好者请原谅我,但是

36:42 我只是把它归结为通过氢能储存电力。我对这个案例不太信服,特别是因为我的背景是天然气和天然气储存。我认为氢能可能有应用场景,但我不认为它在移动出行领域会有商业可行性，至少很明显它已经在商业运输和任何其他运输和移动出行领域输掉了这场战斗。那么,你

37:18 关注这个话题很多吗?你也在使用AI，我发现AI数据中心和当前的建设这个话题非常有趣。它实际上会成为一个障碍吗,意味着我们将无法部署更多的数据中心,因为电网限制?或者你如何看待这个话题?还有电动汽车，是否会有任何容量限制。我认为这有点

37:48 说实话,从能源行业的角度来看,这个话题被过度炒作了,因为其消耗量并没有那么巨大，我的意思是,有时候当你读媒体报道时,你会觉得全球90%的电力都会被数据中心消耗掉。我认为并没有那么大。它更像是个位数的百分比。而且我认为大型发电厂和大型电池储能会找到并网接入点。我更感兴趣的是从灵活性方面,因为如果你

38:23 有批处理作业等等,这些东西可能会相当灵活。但我认为现在还非常非常早期,因为目前运行的数据中心更多是被设计为可用性而非灵活性。新的数据中心可能会被设计成,如果你有批处理作业,你可以根据电价、根据何时运行它们或者完成它们需要多长时间来分配边际成本。所以我认为将会有一个

38:56 令人兴奋的市场。有一个趋势在某种程度上与我刚才说的相反,特别是在美国:发电资产的联合布局。我刚才说的只有在你将其与能源市场整合时才有效。如果你把一个巨大的数据中心放在荒郊野外的某个地方,然后在旁边放一个小型模块化反应堆，

39:29 即小型模块化核反应堆，那么对电网的支持就不会那么大。这实际上是进入另一个话题的很好切入点:你是否看到当前能源系统在灵活性方面存在重大障碍,而其他目标被优先考虑?在我看来,例子包括削峰,我们试图优化最佳基础负载，这会降低电网费用,但它实际上并不激励人们能够对其他信号做出反应,对吧?

40:04 所以这是你刚才给出的一个很好的例子。你对我们能否足够快地改变激励机制,让许多资产能够更多地参与并变得更加灵活,是否持乐观态度?是的,所以我可以分享我与电网运营商合作的经验,对吧?供电安全，砰,就在那里,不要碰它,这是最高的善,对吧?

40:33 电网必须可用,消费者必须获得电力,等等。然后你有可负担性这个话题。这些业务在大多数国家通常是受监管的,对吧?所以它们不是以盈利为导向的,或者说不被允许这样做。所以在我所知道的大多数市场中,它们被允许赚取多少是有上限的,并且你有一个分配成本的机制,对吧?所以它们所做的事情通常会直接影响,也会影响到最终

41:06 消费者,通过不同国家的不同机制。所以实际上输电系统运营商一直被激励去保持系统运行,对吧,着眼于长期视野。不要恐慌。不要实验。只要保持它运行,对吧?而且这很好，我们在欧洲有一个运作良好的系统,是的。我认为没有人可以抱怨,对吧。在其他国家,必须要说的是,因为一些听众可能不知道,限电、停电和持续的缺电，这反而是

41:47 常态。是的。所以我认为当你说灵活性时,你必须把它放在电网规划、电网投资等等这个框架里,对吧?我把灵活性视为扩建或延伸电网的替代方案,对吧?非常经常的情况是你有这一个节点,然后一年只有5次在特殊情况下负载超高等情况下,电网面临约束或接近其极限,对吧?而且我认为灵活性可能是一种非常

42:21 有吸引力的方式,与其扩展这个节点,不如就放一个电池或者其他什么,对吧?已经有一些电网增强项目了,但通常监管阻止了许多电网运营商进行这些基础设施项目,因为第三方接入和非歧视性以及所有那些东西,对吧?因为它从来没有被设计成让私人投资者去某个地方建造智能设施，它总是在公用事业公司和输电系统运营商的控制之下。所以我认为灵活性是或者应该是

42:56 电网基础设施计划的一部分,就这么简单,对吧?而且有不同的解决方案,有时甚至更便宜的方案。我实际上非常高兴,目前，我的意思是,现在终于，我们在谈论能源转型,对吧?来自电池领域,我们有私人投资者来想要建造电池储能,对吧?很多。而且是第一次,没有补贴,对吧?没有现有参与者的介入。很多人抱怨:"哦,光伏在被补贴,一切都在被补贴,什么都不起作用。"

43:35 现在电池来了,它在没有任何补贴的情况下运作,对吧?融资曾经是个问题,但在我们管理的1吉瓦中,900多兆瓦是商业融资的,对吧?所以融资是有效的，当然随着规模扩大会变得更困难,市场需要学习。现在缺少的最后一步是将其与不同的电网杠杆对齐,对吧?现在我们终于在谈论电池储能在某个位置的影响是什么

44:07 因为你不能忽视它所在的位置,对吧?说实话,2年前我会说你把电池储能放在哪里并不重要。但我们也学到了很多,它确实很重要,对吧。如果你在一个特定的节点上,如果在同一个节点上有几个电池，而缺少的是关于如何整合它的明确规则。你可能注意到在媒体上有这些"电网支持型"、"电网友好型"、"电网什么什么"，

44:39 所有这些花哨的词,没有人确切知道它们是什么意思,但归根结底是:"嘿,各位,我是电网运营商,你们必须与我对齐,对吧,因为我了解电网,你想在那里放置资产,我们必须沟通什么能帮助我,什么可能让我的问题变得更糟,对吧?"如果你一年中有这5次负载高峰的情况,而电池在这5次中做了错误的事情

45:05 电网运营商就不会高兴,对吧,即使99%的时间你做得很对。有研究表明这种情况确实正在发生，电池根据价格形成机制以及它在大多数市场中的运作方式,自然而然地做了正确的事情,但可能会有一些情况下你想要限制它的活动或使其与电网的利益保持一致,对吧?所以我认为我们终于到了让所有利益相关者坐到谈判桌前的时刻,说:如果我

45:34 把电池放在那里,而且我已经和所有参与方谈过了,我们就可以建立一个无补贴的方案,推动更高的可再生能源渗透率,而且电网运营商也满意,对吧?所以我认为我们正处在一个非常特殊的时期,对吧?也许两年后我们回顾时会说2025年和2026年是我们搞清楚整个去中心化系统如何运作的年份,对吧?所以这实际上是最有趣的难题之一,也是社会

46:07 还没有充分意识到的一个问题，确实,电网所能做的和可再生能源生产波动性之间存在这种差异。这是需要考虑的两个维度,而电池在某种程度上也在这两者之间发挥作用,这就是为什么如你刚才所说,将电池放置在正确的位置是关键。还有一件事，我的意思是,

46:36 从乐观的角度来看，当然我作为一个人是可能主义者,所以我认为没有什么事情,如果你想做,我们就能做到，但是当然中间有很多障碍。但从物理学角度来看这是可能的;我们可以设计电网和激励机制,使两者能够同步工作。最好的前进方式,我的意思是,这

47:01 从数学角度来看应该是可能的,只是从物理学的角度思考,对吧?现在,从实际问题来说,我们已经在像德国和瑞士这样有很多配电系统运营商的国家看到,这些配电系统运营商似乎也很难跟上这种变化,特别是在将定价调整为实时定价方面,我认为这最终会是一项必需的措施。然后让像你们这样的优化器，这将是一个有趣的过渡

47:34 ，不仅在输电系统运营商层面,也在配电系统运营商层面进行优化,当然可能要优先考虑配电系统运营商作为硬约束。你对此有什么看法?是的,我认为你描述的是集中式系统设计的结果,对吧?因为过去1吉瓦的煤炭机组都连接在哪里?860兆瓦的联合循环燃气轮机都连接在哪里?抽水蓄能都连接在哪里?肯定不是在

48:07 配电网中,不是那种规模。所以控制权，这是我对过去的解读;我没有参与过法规的制定，控制权掌握在输电系统运营商手中,对吧,在高压层面,因为这是大容量连接的地方。所以我认为与较低电网层级之间存在缺失的环节,而较低电网层级

48:40 从未被要求，配电系统运营商，进行接近实时的电网拥堵监测、非常精确的预测等等。所以当我们与他们打交道时,有时数据不存在,或者他们的工作有X分钟的延迟,基本上已经太晚了。然后呼叫由输电系统运营商执行,可能没有考虑到下面的配电系统运营商,因为在一个输电系统运营商下面有大量的配电系统运营商,对吧?而且你是在德国北部还是在

49:13 南部或东部,或者你是靠近大型发电厂还是在大型消费者旁边,这都有区别。所以我认为我们在整合方面有所欠缺，我们只是停留在最高层级,说:输电系统运营商知道一切,由他们做决定。现在我们意识到,对于配电系统运营商层面的小型资产,也许应该以不同的方式建立这个系统,我们需要更多数据来做出明智的决策,而

49:44 不仅仅是在输电系统运营商层面或其他什么层面。所以我认为这是一个我们必须解决的能源市场设计问题,否则我们会很挣扎,找不到最佳解决方案。另一个选择是我们只允许去中心化资产在特定点存在,或者如果我们找不到数据交换和规则的协调方式,它们将在不同点被随机限制,也包括所有配电系统运营商之间。所以我认为，但这又是同一个话题，

50:20 现在我们讨论的是跨所有技术层级的能源转型。从技术上讲,我同意你的看法,完全没问题。数据就在那里;只是需要不同的工作方式。是的,没错,肯定是这样。那么你是否参与政策制定和决策,以及在这个话题相关的方面,是否有任何让你感到乐观的政策变化即将到来?实际上,我本人没有，我的意思是,我们从

50:58 优化器的角度就涉及我们商业模式或客户的话题提供立场文件。我在EPEX交易所委员会任职,代表，EPEX,欧洲最大的电力交易所,有一个由成员组成的委员会。EPEX的所有成员都必须投票决定谁参与其中。这个委员会就像一个咨询委员会,就新产品提供指导,或必须投票

51:37 决定是否在EPEX推出新产品，所以它基本上是所有成员的声音。当然,我们在那里的角色是代表完全自动化的公司,因为我们的需求与德国前四大公司不同,它们拥有庞大的发电资产等等。从这个意义上说,这是一个非常多元化的设置，有强烈可再生能源焦点的参与者、有强烈常规能源焦点的参与者、还有我们这些拥有大量电池的参与者。所以我们试图在

52:13 不同的论坛提供意见,但我们并没有比其他人更积极地参与政策制定。这不是我们的业务;我们根据运营经验提供建议。有道理。我的意思是,你谈到代表完全自动化的参与者,而在这些参与者中,我认为你们推动的关键信息之一，理所当然地，是透明度以及如何保证你对客户做出的承诺得到履行。也许你能详细说明一下如何

52:47 你，我想你们宣布了与毕马威等机构的审计，你能详细说明一下吗?你认为这将如何促进市场发展,使整个承诺变得透明?是的,一方面你必须考虑到电池储能优化是一个相当新的学科。我们提出了跨市场优化,并在2022年向公众展示了它。所以我们签下了我们的

53:16 第一个电池储能项目是在2021年,所以它相当新,大约3.5年的历史。在某个时间点,客户对bankable forecasts(可融资预测)与日常优化结果不一致等问题感到困惑。你想要的是某种投资安全感,对吧?这有很多方面,但其中一个组成部分当然是,我在未来10到15年是否有相同的预测,对吧?以建立我的商业案例。所以我们实际上很早就开始

53:53 与参与者分享我们的一些数据,对吧?但我们发现其他没有运营资产的人，这没有好坏之分，但他们拿出超高的模拟结果说,哇伙计们,我们可以做到每年每兆瓦300,我不知道,1000欧元等等。另一方面,你也有非常缺乏经验的资产所有者,对吧?因为他们可能建造了他们的第一个电池,而且实际上很多人正在建造他们的第一个或第二个

54:28 电池,对吧?所以桌子两边都没有太多经验,对吧?这导致预测越来越高。我们说,伙计们,这有点完全愚蠢。我们知道这不是真的,因为我们有电池实时数据。我们有1小时的,我们有2小时的,我们有接近4小时的;我们有荷兰的,我们有比利时的,我们有奥地利的,我们有德国的,对吧?所以我们有运营经验,所以我们说唯一的

54:59 帮助市场成熟的方法就是公开这些东西,对吧?但是以一种我们不暴露单个资产性能的方式,对吧?这是我们客户的数据。所以为了满足那个质量标准,我们选择了毕马威,一家审计机构,对吧?他们必须遵守所有那些繁琐的规则，相信我,这并不好玩。我们花了大约8或9个月来完成。所以我们必须提供数据,他们问你问题并说,嘿,这

55:26 代表市场吗,还是你在暗示，你如何避免只选取表现好的资产而跳过其余的?所以我们必须向他们展示我们的合同和整个资产基础,背后有四大审计准则。所以我们从今年1月开始发布。我们将发布我们的2小时储能指数。我的意思是,我在柏林的Get Inspired上展示了它。我们也分享了2小时的性能,

55:57 我们目前正在与毕马威认证。你能详细说明一下这个小时性能吗,因为我不清楚,听众可能也不清楚?你是什么意思?是的,在旧世界,3年前或2年前甚至更早,你有设计用于提供频率服务的电池储能,所以主要是FCR(频率控制备用)。要做到这一点,你必须有1小时的储能时长。所以10兆瓦的功率,10兆瓦时的容量,对吧?从0到100%充满你的电池需要多长时间

56:31 是一个小时。放电也一样。这是在资本支出方面,也就是投资方面,提供频率控制备用最具成本效益的配置。这就是为什么在过去,所有电池储能都是1小时的。更早以前,半小时就可以,所以10兆瓦,5兆瓦时，只需要半小时就能完全充电或放电。我们同时在所有市场看到

57:05 没有短于2小时的时长,所以10兆瓦,20兆瓦时。所以完全充电或放电电池储能需要2小时,这当然带来不同的收入潜力。所以2小时储能，首先,它是更新的技术。我们以前的是NMC(镍锰钴);新的是LFP,或磷酸铁锂,有更多的循环次数等等。所以这些是根本不同的配置,我们这样称呼它。所以我们与

57:40 毕马威同意将0.9到1.5小时的1小时储能作为旧世界进行分组，从1.5小时时长到3.5小时我们有第二个集群,代表目前在建的资产。如果我们超过3.5小时储能,我们将为更长时长添加另一个集群,对吧?否则你无法比较性能,对吧?所以如果你建造一个正在建设中的2小时储能,你

58:14 查看我们2小时性能的可比资产。如果你有一个旧的1小时,你看另一个。如果你有更长的时长,你看我们2小时指数的上端。所以在比较资产时保持公平和透明非常重要。这就是想法:无论谁有电池储能,无论是由我们优化、由其他人优化、根本没有优化、在建中,无论什么情况，你去我们的网站,

58:41 你查看数字,你可以下载毕马威报告。里面写有最低性能,也就是表现最差的资产、表现最好的资产,以及按容量加权的投资组合性能。这样一个小的异常表现好的资产不会扭曲你的整体性能。但这都在文件中描述并可供公开下载,我们已经看到这给资产所有者带来了很大的信心,对吧?他们查看

59:13 旧的预测,可融资预测,他们查看实际性能,然后说,好的,它略高一些,他们问并说,哦,我理解为什么预测必须略低一些,因为有像波动性这样的东西无法准确预测。所以它确实有助于教育市场,基本上，我认为，在德国同时想出一个完全编造的数字已经不可能了,对吧?因为客户会去我们的网站说,我赚了3000,我不

59:46 你知道,5月份年化计算,你说你们可以做到800。现在告诉我这是怎么运作的。但其他市场也处于这个水平,对吧?我们最近去了波兰,在华沙。又是同样的情况,没有运营记录,就是要展示高数字。但你知道,存在担忧,因为没有运营数据,没有跨市场的资产。我们建议看看其他国家,对吧?如果你

1:00:21 在奥地利找不到你的梦想之车,或者你梦想之车的价格不合适,你会去看看奥迪或你喜欢的车在德国要多少钱,对吧?或者类似的车要多少钱。所以我想你明白了,对吧?运营数据比单纯的模拟数据要有价值得多。是的,我的意思是,公平地说,正如你所说,我们还处于起步阶段。你知道吗,你能马上说出目前在

1:00:47 关键市场、或欧洲、或德国部署的电池储能容量是多少吗?我只能瞎说。我有好几周没查过数字了,但我记得德国的电网级储能大约是2吉瓦左右,但我总是搞混，德国有很多户用储能,对吧。你们不做任何户用,你们总是做更多固定式和协同部署的,对吧?这就是。然后,在商业领域我们有

1:01:16 一个与合作伙伴的VPP,到年底我们将聚合几千个小型电池,但我们的核心重点是电网级，所以是更大的电池,从个位数兆瓦到三位数兆瓦。这是目前的最佳区间。但我们也看到公用事业级电池储能已经运行了2到3年。从技术角度来说,不是问题。那会有，我记得仅德国就有

1:01:51 200吉瓦的管道项目?500。500。好的,那你认为实际上会建成多少,速度有多快?所以我们非常透明地分享了，我们有一些非常好的开发商客户,我们根据那些真正聪明的人对管道项目的判断,假设最终会是个位数百分比,而且是比较小的一个数字。因为如果一个

1:02:26 优秀的玩家,了解这个行业,之前做了不知道15年的光伏项目,认识电网运营商,知道如何获得电网接入,能达到中等个位数百分比,那么还有一些外行，不是德国人,对吧?所以是德国以外的爱好者来尝试。所以我认为我们最终会落在,我不知道,500吉瓦中的10吉瓦左右。就是,我

1:03:01 和一个希望很快成为客户的人聊过,他们没有15年的光伏背景,对他们来说唯一的办法就是提交电网申请。这就是唯一的方法。这就像销售,对吧?如果你做传统的软件销售,每个人都知道你必须填满你的管道,每个阶段都会有成功率,最后大约是30%

1:03:33 取决于你从哪里开始,来追踪。这是一样的。我认为电网运营商只是没有为此设计系统,对吧，先到先得等等。因为过去谁建造大型资产?现有企业,甚至在二十年前,在它们被拆分之前,它们曾经是一家公司。所以再说一次,这是我世界里系统设计的结果。没有什么不好,双方都没有恶意。但没有妥善设计一个

1:04:09 处理所有这些电网请求的系统。有道理,是的。那我们来谈谈里程碑。你们已经取得了相当多的里程碑。B轮融资是之前的事了,然后你可以分享一些数字,让听众也能了解你们的规模以及你们的计划，你们想在几年后达到什么水平?不幸的是,我们的计划在变化，不是我们的北极星,对吧,成为全球电池优化器，但是

1:04:41 你知道,当我们在1.5年前完成2550万欧元的B轮融资时,想法是在欧洲的一些国家运营,基本上让欧洲实现盈亏平衡,作为一个据点或基础,然后在全球扩张。然后突然我们与一个令人惊叹的合作伙伴Optimus Energy在希腊合作270兆瓦项目。我们与西班牙和葡萄牙一个非常优秀的合作伙伴Nexus Energy合作。我们与Ecoortes合作，DNA非常匹配，在波兰等地。所以欧洲在电池

1:05:22 储能方面发展迅猛,对吧?所以我们总是回到更多的国家。我们收到来自罗马尼亚的请求，你无法想象。我过去在布加勒斯特待过相当长的时间。但是,所以情况是,你有这些成熟的市场,对吧,英国实际上是欧洲最早的。在欧洲大陆,现在它们根据市场成熟度堆叠起来,每当我们

1:05:57 说,好的,1.5年后我们看看,或者我们现在开始更多地关注美国，就像,这里有欧洲的另一个国家,这里有另一个国家,这里有另一个国家,对吧?所以欧洲让我们相当忙碌。比如希腊,原本不在我们的路线图想法中,我们有，我是说,那里最大的资产是150兆瓦,300兆瓦时,相当可观。欧洲让我们保持忙碌,目标是全球,对吧?我们与日本合作伙伴迈出第一步

1:06:27 步,我们的股东之一,很快会宣布。所以如果我们能接入日本电力交易所,我们正在建立第一批预测等等。所以日本将是我们的第一个全球市场。但是对于美国,我们必须首先照顾好我们的本土大陆,可以这么说,然后再迈出更大的一步。

1:07:01 地理上相当遥远?你要保持产品质量和所需的客户支持。实际上,这从一开始就是计划。我要说我们终于到了我们想要的位置,对吧?5.5年前创立公司时。由于我们所有人都有技术软件背景,想法是用技术而不是人员来扩展规模。我们现在取得的成就，我几天前和联合创始人兼CTO Wolfgang聊过，

1:07:35 我们改进了一些优化方面的竞价策略,突然之间这个竞价改进在德国、奥地利、比利时、荷兰、法国都产生了影响。所以我们在平台层面实现了这种杠杆效应。从战略上讲,一方面是风险分散、收入多元化、进入新国家,但另一方面确实是在利用这样一个事实:市场,尤其是欧洲大陆的市场，暂时跳过英国，但在欧洲大陆是协调统一的。为什么跳过英国?因为他们

1:08:09 从来不想与欧洲其他地区协调统一。那个市场的运作方式从根本上就不同。你没有一个单一的共享订单簿,所以你有不同的池子,流动性也不同。拍卖由两个NEMO,也就是两个电力交易所组织。你有不同的辅助服务,所以输电系统运营商对你的要求与欧洲大陆不同，有些相似,有些完全不同。通过互联线连接,采用显性容量拍卖而不是隐性拍卖,这与

1:08:45 我们在欧洲大陆使用的SDAC和SIDC不同。所以他们只是没有参与超过十年的协调统一进程。这意味着在规模化和地理扩张方面他们是不同的,我认为这也是为什么你很少看到英国企业出现在欧洲大陆的原因。他们更倾向于关注澳大利亚和美国。有些确实会,比如Octopus或Kraken,但这比你最初想象的

1:09:16 要大得多的跨越。除此之外,我们通过技术实现规模化。有些市场更容易,有些更复杂,但通常我们只需要几个月就能为一个新国家构建出非常稳固的东西,这是令人震撼的,而这也正是我们的计划。是的,恭喜你们。然后转到车队和智能充电方面，播客也涉及这个话题。我会很好奇,我也想感谢你

1:09:46 到目前为止作为RiDERgy顾问提供的帮助，非常有用。你对车队、电气化、智能充电的看法是什么,特别是它如何与Inspired契合?如果你对双向充电以及这些类型的话题所蕴含的潜力有任何想法的话。是的,我作为一名热情的电动汽车驾驶者已经将近10年了。实际上,很多人不知道我们在Inspired

1:10:20 曾在一家奥地利公用事业公司内部推出过第一个智能充电解决方案,大约4年前,我想是在2021年上线的。那时候企业甚至不确定智能充电和负载管理是不是一回事。大多数企业所说的负载管理指的是削峰，削减峰值，而我们所说的智能充电是指根据电价优化车辆充电。

1:10:52 那在当时没有规模化。波动性不够,认知度不够,没有现货价格指数电价,说实话充电基础设施也不够。那时候没有太多的CPO，充电点运营商。所以我认为我们有点早了。别误会,但从算法角度来说,与电池相比这是小菜一碟,对吧?智能充电，这在vehicle-to-grid出现时会改变,当然，但纯粹的充电,

1:11:27 现在基本上你用现货价格电价就能免费获得。这就是背景。你可以认为我是电动汽车的坚定信仰者。我认为到目前为止规模化的最大问题,或者说为什么我们进展不够快,是因为移动出行行业低估了能源行业，谁拥有计量点,该计量点的供应商扮演什么角色,平衡是如何运作的,

1:12:04 你如何影响预测?我认为我们看到很多企业认为:随便接入某个地方就搞定了。然后就会发现,哦,如果你有10个充电点,抱歉,我的供应情况就不一样了。然后,哦,这是一个电表，在同一个电表上用两种不同的电价是行不通的，诸如此类的事情。这是我在过去几年中听到和学到的。所以我认为

1:12:32 从我的角度来看,目前最大的潜力是商业或企业车队,在那里你可以控制车辆。因为如果是居民用户,也许他们不太高兴你摆弄他们价值8万欧元的电池。但如果是公司车辆、货车、电动公交车，它们通常由公司拥有、运营或租赁。所以我认为你也能达到一定的规模

1:13:07 这很有趣。所以我认为这应该是可行的。预测车队也比预测单个资产更容易,对吧?从组合的角度来看,我认为你可以在某个时间点现实地实现vehicle-to-grid,因为到底谁会在家里花2,500到3,000欧元买一个vehicle-to-grid充电器?所以我认为在居民层面,我们还没到那一步,但在车队层面,我认为已经有很多企业拥有大型车队了,从Inspired的

1:13:44 角度来看,一旦vehicle-to-grid变得有吸引力,因为我们不在乎是64个集装箱静止地放在现场,还是200辆可以连接和断开的汽车，从优化的角度来说非常相似,不完全相同,但相似。在你看来,一旦我们进入双向充电时代,就部署的电池数量而言会有冲突吗?固定电池和移动电池之间会有竞争吗?

1:14:14 会有蚕食效应吗?在能源方面肯定会有。但说实话,我无法判断,如果汽车在正确的时间点连接的话。如果它们都在中午连接,从能源角度来说这是合理的,那么你通常会有更长的持续时间。所以这也取决于充电器有多快,汽车能够以多快的速度充放电,以及

1:14:47 主机厂接受什么,对吧?假如你有一个400千瓦的直流充电器，我不知道如果你在几分钟内把电动汽车的电池完全放空,然后在另外10分钟内又充满,他们是否会乐意。所以我认为很大程度上取决于在功率和兆瓦时或吉瓦时等方面可用的灵活性。但是的,他们应该玩同样的游戏,并且会面临

1:15:19 同样的话题,对吧?在某个时间点,配电系统运营商会出现并说:"各位,抱歉,在这个节点上你们不能在这个时间点充电3兆瓦,也不能放电3兆瓦。"所以我认为它应该完全整合,并希望能从电网规模部署的经验中获益。我毫不怀疑这会成功,只是时间问题。听起来不错。在这个充满希望的话题上,

1:15:53 我想问你是否有一些想对听众说的最后寄语,还有人们如何能最好地与你联系。与我个人还是与Inspired?两者都是。与我们联系很容易，只要你参与电池领域,你迟早会在某些活动等场合遇到我们。你随时可以给我们留言。联系我最快的方式

1:16:25 是WhatsApp，这是我妻子联系我的方式,所以我必须查看是否收到消息。LinkedIn比较棘手;我收到大量垃圾信息,我刚意识到我没有回复3个月前甚至更早的消息,这让我有点尴尬。但我想你会找到办法联系我或我的同事。

1:16:53 你联系Claudio,他会给我发WhatsApp。

1:16:58 是的,很乐意做个介绍。这很合理。

1:17:04 是的,你有什么鼓舞人心的最后寄语想分享吗?我只能说:如果你还没有活跃在能源行业,我认为这是几十年来最激动人心的时刻。这是一个独特的机会,无论以什么角色,对吧?如果你谈论电动出行,如果你谈论电池储能供应,无论是什么,我认为现在真的是我们在能源领域经历

1:17:39 范式转变的时刻,对吧?所以我认为,如果你有机会参与能源行业,现在就是时候。我希望在一二十年后,我们都会非常自豪地讲述20年前我们为新能源系统投入了多少工作。所以这就是我热爱我的工作的原因,对吧?能源永远不会无聊,而现在它极其令人兴奋。难以置信。我完全同意你的看法。谢谢你,Jürgen,感谢你的时间和你的

1:18:12 精力。继续保持。祝你晚上愉快。谢谢,你也是。这是来自Inspired的Jürgen。这次对话表明,电池不仅仅是硬件，它们是市场参与者。关键优势来自快速自动化,从测量到预测,从预测到投标,从投标到调度。性能可以用简单、具体的指标来评判:相比日前价格的捕获率、完成交易所需的时间,以及预测错误的成本。价值从来不是在每个地方都

1:18:52 相同。它取决于当地拥堵、不平衡波动和国家特定规则。当有适当的风险组合时,商业电池项目可以运作,包括上限和下限结构、混合收入来源,以及辅助服务的早期预资格认证。现场成功取决于集成细节、可靠的能源管理系统合同、定义的回退状态、良好的测试计划和可靠的遥测。清洁的数据和清晰的审计跟踪与贷款机构和监管机构建立信任。将储能与风能或太阳能共址可以增加选择,但电网限制和削减可以同样

1:19:38 迅速地消除这些收益。一个实际的下一步是在单一市场区域内实现端到端自动化,并且只有在同样的关键绩效指标在回测之外也成立后才扩展。接下来是配电层面更多的灵活性、更快的结算周期和更严格的性能保证。这是一个非常复杂的节目,展示了Jürgen和Inspired为市场和谈判桌带来的专业水平。我非常高兴他在RiDERgy为我们提供咨询,并继续合作,希望也能一起扩展。

1:20:17 将这样的解决方案应用到车队。感谢收听Smart Charge by RiDERgy,我们下期节目再见。保持充电。

0:11 Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.

0:39 Welcome back to Smart Charge. Today we are with Jurgen Meyerhofer, founder and CEO of Inspired, an optimizer of battery storage. Jurgen's path runs from the early days of gas market liberalization in Austria - think the famous Baumgarten node, capacity booking and real physics - to today's software-driven power markets where batteries are dispatched in real time. We get practical about intraday trading. Germany alone sees 10+ million price updates per day, stacking day-ahead, intraday and ancillary services, and why the truly hard part is the last mile of automation:

1:22 connecting the EMS to a trading platform that can forecast, decide and dispatch quarter-hour by quarter-hour - there are 96 products per day. Jurgen explains how Inspired connects to batteries via EMS, optimizes at 100-megawatt-scale projects, and why batteries can work without subsidies if you respect location, grid impact and build for full automation rather than manual lever-pushing. If you care about turning storage into a profit-making, grid-supporting resource, this one is your field guide. I'm very proud to have Jurgen also advising RiDERgy.

1:58 And let's dive in. Hello Jurgen, how are you today? Hi Claudio, very well - thanks for inviting me. Yeah, happy to have you, and so glad to learn more about you and Inspired. So let's start with you first. I know you have quite a long background already in the energy space. What was the inception - where did you know that this was the space you wanted to work in? And what were the key steps in your journey so far, if you had to spend just one

2:31 minute or two about your background? OK, where do I start? First of all, I was always very interested in computer science, so it was clear to me to work in that space. I applied for a lot of different jobs without any clear goal, I would say. And by accident I moved to a - nowadays you would call it a startup, right? Back then it was just

3:05 a small company - I joined as employee number 18. It was 2002 when the natural gas market in Austria was liberalized, so we moved away from fax messages to nominate natural gas imports, to fancy Excel spreadsheets via email - meanwhile still known as the very famous KISS formats. And that's how I by accident stumbled into the energy market. So actually my background is in natural gas logistics, if you want to call it like

3:42 that. My first bigger project was writing the algorithm to optimize physical gas flows - with compressor stations and imports and exports. Back then it was a nodal system, right? There are a lot of discussions going on in the power market about nodal pricing - this is how natural gas works, roughly 25 years ago. And as soon as I found out that I was really moving physical natural gas, and the pipeline runs along the highway I had to

4:15 drive home on, and I passed the compressor station, I actually thought: that's quite cool, because software had a physical impact, and I knew what was going on there physically. So you were managing gas flows the way you're managing power flows now. Yes, actually the start was really imports at Baumgarten - that's a famous node in Austria where we import from Slovakia, so mainly Gazprom gas back then. OMV, the Austrian oil and gas

4:48 major, was I think the first to conclude a long-term contract with Gazprom. And that gas is then distributed to Germany, to Hungary, to Italy via various pipelines, and you have to book capacity there in different qualities - that's a topic meanwhile in power markets too, so firm or interruptible capacity, etc. And then you really have to consider physics: different heating values for natural gas, high and low heating values. Back then we had something

5:24 called different gas days. In the control area - the DSO equivalent - we had 0-to-0, basically a calendar day. On the transport side we had 6-to-6, and for imports we worked on 8-to-8 o'clock schedules, and we had to bring that all together, while the colleagues in Germany worked on a calendar day in kilowatt hours - so no messing around with heating

5:56 values and all that. But gas does have a quality dimension, unlike power. So that was the energy background. You also had a bit of an entrepreneurial side, and you could highlight some of the milestones that led you to Inspired, entrepreneurially speaking. I always tended to work in small, innovative companies - not because I chose them; I think they

6:30 rather chose me as their employee. From the first company liberalizing the gas markets, to being a freelancer helping customers with market entries across Europe, to doing consultancy for short-term power trading - my whole career has been driven by innovation in the software and energy space, and always luckily in roles where I could take a lot of decisions and a lot of responsibility, like in my previous role as managing director.

7:07 of Visotec. Super small Austrian company back then, and scaled across Europe within 2.5 years organically, so no investors behind, etc. So there were quite some rewards in the past, let's call it like this, for taking risks. So I think there was not a single time whenever we did the bigger strategic move that it failed. So I'm knocking on wood now, but so far we had a very good gut feeling for bold

7:41 moves. And I think that also gave us the confidence for Inspired. The first people who joined Inspired, we had worked together, we had seen that it works, what we're doing. Everybody was clear about his or her role in the organization, so I would say it was the natural result of 20 years' experience, to do what we do now at Inspired. Yeah, it's fascinating. And to what extent do you attribute your last

8:15 experience with Viso to Inspired? What were the building blocks, so to say, that you are now also leveraging? I think one topic that we all learned there is scalability. It's very easy to lose yourself in chasing exciting opportunities. A little project here, a little project there. But it just takes forever to scale a company. Another part of scalability: if you're organically growing, you're always in that mode of first signing a customer, OK, now I have enough money

8:55 to recruit two more people and I have to sign the next projects. And you're in theory always lagging behind. And if you really want to be bold and see an upcoming opportunity and you want to invest upfront, then it's really hard to do in an organic way, unless you're already a huge corporate and you have money on the side and you just invest it. But if you're growing it from zero, bootstrapped organically, I think you will be

9:24 too slow for some markets, when you think about AI advancements, when you think about what's going on with battery storage or how fast the energy industry has gone in general. I'm coming from a time where everything took years and nobody was in a hurry in the energy industry. There was no discussion about energy transition. There was no volatility, no nothing. It was a very stable, regulated business, and now I have the feeling it's exactly

9:56 the opposite. Regulation cannot keep up, incumbent players struggling a bit sometimes with speed. So there are a lot of learnings we've taken, and also things that we wanted to avoid in a sense. We have also learned what's not that smart. For example, we had been an Austrian company and everything was in German - internal documentation, emails, contracts, whatever. Which is a problem if you scale geographically in sales, which is a

10:33 problem if you onboard your first employee who doesn't speak German. So you either limit yourself and say, sorry, only German speakers allowed, and you miss out on a lot of great talent, or you do that fundamentally different. That was something we did from day one at Inspired - everything is English, all contracts are English. We rather had to struggle the other way around. German customers asked for German contracts and we were like, oh my God, we don't have them,

11:00 even as an Austrian company. So there were things that worked very well, like focus on scalability and what it takes, and there were other things that we just learned because it was very cumbersome in the past, how we set it up. So I think it's a good mix of different experiences. Cool. And talking about software, languages, cultures and scaling, I'd be very curious to hear your opinion. As

11:30 we are in this age of AI as well, there are plenty of companies built in the US that are successful, also from the internet age - software companies - and we seem to struggle in Europe compared to the US and China and some other regions. Whereas you are a brilliant example of a software company that is successful internationally and has been able to develop top-notch software out of Europe. What's your take on this, and what

12:03 makes you optimistic that Europe can also turn things around? And what do you attribute to this weakness of Europe, and how come there are not more Inspireds out there? I think there are quite some. The problem that we have is we reached some kind of glass ceiling at some point in terms of scaling. I think entrepreneurship in Europe is still not recognised as super valuable.

12:38 We still live from the well-known brands that have been established decades ago and are now big companies. I think it's pretty good in Europe to get early-stage funding up to a certain stage, but if you really want to scale a business, very often investors from the US, Asia, etc. are involved. So I think we have the talent and we have the technology, but we're just not brave or bold enough. I mean, you

13:08 could challenge me now and say, what held you back from raising €500 million and going all in? And it's not the vision - it's just the capital. Other companies burn billions of euros based on the vision, and typically these companies are sitting outside of Europe. And these are the admired ones. I think there is one financing issue, and the other is cultural. Everything

13:40 has been working well, right? The automotive industry - but nobody thinks back on, I mean, they also started small, and now they're established. And I think there is not enough support in terms of capital, regulation sometimes, and sometimes just recognition from, I don't know, politicians, other industries, etc. So that's my take. I know that's a very high-level one, but I think if somebody would say, "Hey Jürgen, do you want to have 200 million to go totally crazy"

14:14 on a global level, we would know how to spend that money, right? I'm pretty sure. OK. So I'm looking forward. You already have raised your Series B. Obviously, you will probably not stay there and we'll come back to that. Just one more point before we move and deep dive into Inspired and what you do - to the point we just made: is there, in your view - we talk a lot about decentralization of the energy world, but in my view

14:43 we don't talk enough about the software definition of the energy world and these changes. We talk about in mobility, as we are at the intersection of mobility and energy, there's always the concept of the software-defined vehicle coming up over and over. I feel in the energy world we don't talk enough about it also transitioning towards a software-defined energy world. I'd love to have your take on that. I mean, everything we do is software,

15:09 right? Everything is automated, so no human intervention from the point in time the algorithm is live - from automated retraining, to optimizing the parameters, to adapting to fundamental situations. I think, to be honest, it will be the only way, because decentralized small assets are fundamentally different to dispatch and to manage than centralized large assets, right? I think incumbent players are extremely good at managing their large portfolios, but what we

15:47 see is that we just lack, as an energy industry in general, execution capabilities for decentralized setups, right? Ranging from smart meter - I wouldn't even call it software that you need there - from smart meter rollout to behind-the-meter optimization, that's all super nascent, right? I have all this fancy setup at home, from EV to charger to battery storage to heat pump, whatever, and the solutions are just not where they are on slides in reality.

16:26 Unfortunately. So I think there is far not enough focus on software and technology. It's still: get this battery, buy it, install it, and you're done. And I think that leaves out quite some potential. And of course you have the incumbent world that kind of holds us back a bit, right? Because politically I see that there are also different directions being taken with conventional power plants, etc. So I think some stakeholders are stuck in the old world

17:02 that they've known for decades, which goes back to the previous question, right? If they would be bold on technology, there should be way more investment in AI, in energy tech companies and whatsoever. But I think they have not realized it yet, because the incumbents tell them, "Guys, everything is fine - build some gigawatts of whatever power plant type and we will solve it the old way," which is correct, right? It worked in the past, why shouldn't it work

17:31 now? But you just have to ignore the energy transition and all the other things. So I think the players who will win are those that have good software capabilities. Thanks. Now I'd like to do a maybe fun exercise. One of the most impressive things you have, next to building Inspired, is that you're also a father of five kids. How do you explain Inspired to your kids? If you have to explain it in a simple way, in a short way - what does

18:05 dad do, so to say? The easiest one is if we're in the car, right - in Austria we have quite some wind farms. I always tell them that we take the power out of that wind farm, store it, and deliver it whenever it's needed, so that the lights are on. That's the pitch for four-year-olds, right? I've of course shown them our projects on pictures - 100 megawatts that we optimize - and then

18:34 they are blown away that the battery could be that big, right? They still - you know, they're kids - they think of the small little things for their toys, that's a battery in their world. But that's the easiest one, right? Having something tangible, because it's basically impossible to describe a software platform or full automation - that doesn't mean anything. But if you have a physical wind farm that you pass by with the car and you show them a picture of a battery and say you just store

19:01 it and release it later, they're most probably fine with it. Nice one. I like it. And how do you explain Inspired shortly to an energy expert, somebody who knows the industry well? Then I would typically explain that we're a commercial optimizer of battery storage, right? So we connect via the EMS with our platform, connect on the other side to all markets - which is wholesale and ancillary services - and with our fully automated

19:34 setup, take care of all the forecasting and bidding decisions in between, with the goal to generate maximum revenue for the asset owner. Something like that - and typically there are still follow-up questions coming. Exactly, and that's a good segue to the follow-up questions. So in the value stream, what was also the insight compared to the conventional trading that was done before Inspired, so to say?

20:06 In the era of - what would you say? How would you compare it? I would say that the era before, where I've also worked - I was involved in CCGTs and whatever - the focus was very much on the long term, on a very detailed modeling of the asset. You wouldn't know what you need to do for a spot optimization of the CCGT, what to consider, from ramps to temperatures to whatever. So I think

20:41 the last decades were really focused on the technical details of the assets and their optimization. And I think this is where we have seen our opportunity, because when we asked incumbent players, "Are you optimizing your flexibility?" they were like, "Sure." But what they meant is they optimized it, bid it into the day-ahead auction, and then went for lunch. And that was flex optimization back then, and it's not wrong - it

21:14 is actually flex optimization. But up to that point, you just needed to be very good at optimizing your asset: get your dispatch out, get your shadow prices and all that stuff, your PFCs, you bid, and you're done. And then you told the guys at the power plant, "Do this tomorrow," based on what had just been awarded in the day-ahead auction. The last mile is way more complex with intraday and real-time dispatch. So, from

21:46 both sides - for dispatching the power plant when it's not fully automated, there are still power plants where people are sitting there pushing the levers, more or less - that's a change management topic, to convince people who have been ramping it up just once a day that they should now dispatch a quarter-hourly schedule, and to explain it to them after three decades of doing the same thing. Then there are the software capabilities that you need. I mean,

22:16 there are some tools out there, but if you want to be really exceptional, a standard tool will just not give you an edge compared to all the others who buy the same standard tool. So I think that still makes it really tricky for quite a few of the incumbent players - this change in mode of operation, where suddenly there is a lot of value in the last mile of flex optimization and you need software and technology for it.

22:44 And automated processes. So I think that's fundamentally different, and that's where we jumped in and said we see an opportunity to be better than incumbent players, because we don't have to compete in the other areas - they've been doing those for decades, they know what they do. So, just maybe for the listeners' sake: we are talking about the fundamental problem that you're trying to solve - or that you solve - which is

23:16 that companies are not able to automatically control any assets. That's one big dimension, and the other is being able to react to more market signals and predict better how those market signals should interact with an asset. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could call it like that, right? Because the new signals that you mentioned are, for example, intraday price changes - more than 10 million updates per

23:56 day in Germany, for example. Somebody has to listen to them, and it's for sure not a human - I mean, you can give it a try - but that requires technology to be very efficient with that. And I think that's just a paradigm shift in how you optimize flexible assets, especially flex assets. Yeah. And the opportunity - maybe just to lay some groundwork - there are the spot markets, which are composed

24:28 of the day-ahead and the intraday. Your price is usually a result - and is influenced much more by the volatility of renewables - and the result of supply and demand at 15-minute slots. That's one optimization that you do. And you're also, I think, participating in the balancing services markets, which are the transmission system operators - the grids that are trying to keep the capacity flowing through the different cables at

24:59 all times stable at 50 Hz. And within the TSOs - because I'm sure we will use these terminologies - there are different markets: there's the very short-term FCR, and then there's the somewhat longer-term aFRR, which are to be distinguished. I would even argue that all the markets you have mentioned are kind of balancing markets in a sense, because the big difference for wholesale is you trade before delivery - so we

25:31 can trade now for tonight and even for tomorrow already, all the 30-minute products and 96 for tomorrow. And that's kind of part of - if we stay with Germany, for example - the market model where you're required to trade out your renewable deltas, so updates. So if at a certain point in time, closer to delivery, you see, "Oh my God, there is more PV or less PV, or more wind than expected," then you have to trade

26:00 the difference. That's kind of a pre-balancing. If you skipped that, as was done in the past, you would have to take the full delta between what you thought yesterday in the day-ahead auction and what is really happening - and ancillary services then happen during the 15-minute delivery period. So the TSO says - or the frequency is automated - "This is what I'm seeing with the grid. I need assets to help me."

26:29 Right, if there is less PV than expected even half an hour ago, if there is a power plant outage - but I think the whole process that you described helps balancing the grid, right, either before or during delivery, in closer to real time. And you engage in all of these - you said yes, sure. That was kind of the innovation for battery storages, right? If you look back 4 years from now, batteries were all in frequency containment

27:02 reserve - the FCR you have mentioned - which is, let's call it, pretty easy to manage because of a frequency controller on site that measures on-site frequency, and if there is too much electricity in the grid you charge, and vice versa, right? So it's a rather passive service. There was no creative bidding strategy or whatsoever. And over the last 4 years that's transformed to a fully-fledged algorithmic optimization problem, right, trying to find the optimum of how and where to participate

27:37 with your battery storage. Very interesting. And are there limits to your solution geographically speaking? So all that we're talking about right now is the liberalized markets, I understand. So any market that is still in the old world - so before 1997 in Europe - I'm not sure how it is exactly in the US or how the history of liberalized power markets was in all countries. But is it correct that you're limited by the countries that are

28:09 not liberalized? Yes, to be precise - to have the biggest added value of our software, or our service actually, right, because you also get route to market, not only - so we don't license the software but offer the full service. You would ideally have ancillary services or balancing markets organized by the TSOs, which is typically the case, plus a liquid wholesale market, or also imbalance markets like the Netherlands or Denmark, etc. So

28:47 several revenue streams. If you have a country where FCR would be dominant, right, and there is no wholesale market, you can use our software, but it will not provide a huge uplift compared to what incumbents do, right? So that would be a red flag for us to enter that market, because we only go if we add more value. So Europe is well suited in general. We're also entering the Japanese market with a

29:19 partner - announcement to follow soon. The US is differently organized via the ISOs, in 5-minute granularity, but would work. Australia the same. But I would not argue for every country - for more than 200 on this planet, right? So we need a certain infrastructure of a liberalized market - a pool for liquidity and different services; otherwise the optimization problem is not big enough that it requires us. But let's say, to take one example

29:55 that I think is always underdiscussed in the Western world and is still shaping the energy transition like no other: how would Inspire be used in China? Or could that be an option? I think in theory yes. Last time I talked with somebody, like 3–4 weeks ago about it, I'm not clear yet if spot markets are fully established and accessible for third parties, etc. - and those would be things that we just use, right. So it has to

30:28 be liberalized and allow equal access also for third-party players. But if that's the case, China would be one. I just haven't heard from anybody who said, "Hey guys, China has everything you need," right? I think it's on its way. I've also been in contact - to give another example - with the Indian Power Exchange already before Inspire, because they were establishing a spot market. So I think there are some countries emerging

31:03 in that sense - they look at which market models have been proven successful in other regions and lean on them, right? They don't copy them, but they say, "OK, it works with these qualities, it makes sense." It's physical products, right? It's grid frequency - it's the same basically in every country, even if you have 60 instead of 50 Hz, etc. The fundamental concept is the same, right? So

31:35 no limitations - let's say regulatory maturity or liberalization maturity is the limiting factor for us to go there. And is your vision of where the energy world is going - I'm talking really the whole world - that we will have 100% renewables, so wind, solar, and batteries, and then have increasing liberalization and then optimizations like Inspire in the, let's say, next 40 years? I hope that it will be faster, to be honest, but

32:12 I think it's not only about renewables and batteries - of course that's an extremely good combination. But depending on the current generation stack, right, the initial goal is to decarbonize, right? So phasing out the most dirty ones first. I think there is still in some markets a role for natural gas, for example, as a solution before we go to a higher renewable penetration, because what we've seen in some markets like Spain or

32:45 ERCOT, etc., is that grid infrastructure is maybe not fully ready yet for 100% renewable penetration. So we see first grid-forming setups, etc., and we see a lot of co-location discussions going on, but it's more discussions than real rollout. So I think we also have to give the grids some time to catch up with the speed of, for example, PV and battery rollout. But yes, in the end I think it should work. We're also missing long

33:20 Duration storage. I'm a bit biased as an Austrian, right? We have a lot of pumped hydro, so we don't have that big a problem, but other countries don't have the opportunity to just build pumped hydro. And it takes quite some time. So I think long duration storage is the missing piece to get to a 100% renewable world, but there is no incentive in most markets yet. And it's not commercially viable, so a lot of projects

33:51 in the longer durations have been built out of a security-of-supply mindset, I would say. That's why a lot of them are state-owned or controlled by countries. So I think that's still missing something to make it commercially attractive. And what's your best guess - if you had to take a guess - what will be the long-term solution for the one-to-two-day volatility of renewables? I mean, every country is

34:23 a bit different, but let's take continental Europe in particular as an example, Germany, where we're already at 60% renewables and really heading fast to 100%. Will we have the need for hydrogen? Will we just install even more batteries because they will be getting so cheap that it will actually be economical to have a two-week battery backup? Or more interoperability - there's actually the Redefining Energy podcast and others that are talking about

34:53 plans to build a line between Canada and Europe. Some interoperability between different countries, interconnectors. Yeah, I think there are indeed some intercontinental plans for cables, etc., but those are huge infrastructure projects. I don't know how fast. I'm not a battery expert in terms of chemistry. I don't know how far you can push the duration and which would be the most cost-efficient. Maybe we get surprised by other technologies like

35:29 flow batteries, right - they've been around for quite some time but never found their sweet spot. There are biodegradable materials inside, etc., so they would even be more sustainable than classical LFPs. So maybe long duration storage, LDES, will find its sweet spot. There are a lot of experiments with compressed air, etc. I think as soon as the markets are there for the so-called Dunkelflauten, maybe TSOs will

36:06 procure long duration storage, etc., and then the commercially most competitive solution will just win, right? No matter if it's compressed air or flow or whatever it may be. So I don't have a huge bet on a single technology. I'm just not a big fan of hydrogen - to produce it from wind, lose efficiency, transport it, lose efficiency, regasify, lose efficiency, and burn it, lose efficiency again. So forgive me if you're a hydrogen fan, but

36:42 I'm just boiling it down to storing electricity via hydrogen. I'm not convinced about that case, especially as my background is natural gas and natural gas storage. I think there may be applications for hydrogen, but I don't think it will be commercially viable in mobility - at least it's very clear that it has already lost the battle in commercial transportation and in any other transportation and mobility. And, are you

37:18 following this topic a lot? You're also using AI - I find the topic of AI data centers and the build-out right now very interesting. Could it actually become a hurdle, meaning we won't be able to deploy more data centers because of grid constraints? Or how do you look at that topic? And also EVs - if there will be any capacity limitation. I think it's a bit

37:48 hyped, the topic, to be honest, from an energy industry perspective, because the consumption is not as huge as - I mean, sometimes you get the feeling when you read the media that 90% of global electricity will be consumed by data centers. I think it's not that big. It's rather single-digit percentages. And I think large power plants and large battery storages will find grid access. I'm rather interested from the flexibility side, because if you

38:23 have batch jobs, etc., these things could be quite flexible. But I think it's very, very early, because data centers that run now are rather designed to be available and not flexible. New data centers may be designed so that, if you have batch jobs, you could assign marginal costs based on electricity prices, based on when you run them, or how long it takes to complete them. So I think there will be

38:56 an exciting market. There is one trend that speaks a bit against what I'm just saying, especially in the US: the co-location of generation assets. What I just said only works if you integrate it with energy markets. If you put a huge data center somewhere in the middle of nowhere and then put an SMR next to it -

39:29 a small modular reactor, nuclear reactor - then the grid support is not that big. And that's actually a good segue into another topic: do you see major hurdles in the energy system as it stands right now in terms of flexibility versus other goals that are being favored? Examples in my view are peak shaving, where we're trying to optimize for the optimal base load - that reduces grid fees, but it doesn't really incentivize being able to react to other signals, right?

40:04 So that's a good example of the one you just gave as well. Are you optimistic that we will be fast enough to change incentives for many assets to be able to participate more and be more flexible? Yeah, so I can just share my experience working with grid operators, right? So there is security of supply - bang, it's there, don't touch it, it's the highest good, right?

40:33 The grid has to be available and consumers have to get the electricity, etc. Then you have this topic of affordability. The businesses are typically in most countries regulated, right? So they're not profit-oriented, or are not allowed to be. So in most markets that I'm aware of, there is a cap on how much they're allowed to earn, and you have a mechanism for distributing the costs, right? So what they do has direct impacts, typically also on end

41:06 consumers, via different mechanisms in different countries. So actually TSOs have always been incentivized to keep the systems running, right, with a long-term horizon. Don't panic. Don't experiment. Just keep it running, right? And it's great - we have a very well-working system, yeah, in Europe. I think nobody can complain, right. In other countries, it has to be said, because some listeners might not know, brownouts and blackouts and constant lack of light - it's rather the

41:47 norm. Yeah. So I think when you say flexibility, you have to put it into this box of grid planning, grid investments, etc., right? I see flexibility as an alternative to expanding or extending the grid, right? Very often you have this one node, and then just 5 times a year in special situations with super high load, etc., the grid faces constraints or comes close to its limits, right? And I think flexibility could be a very

42:21 charming way of, instead of extending this node, just putting in a battery or whatsoever, right? There are some grid booster projects already, but typically regulation holds a lot of grid operators back from doing these infrastructure projects, because of third-party access and non-discriminatory and all that stuff, right? Because it has never been designed for private investors going somewhere and building smart things - it was always under the control of utilities and TSOs. So I think flexibility is, or should be, part of

42:56 the grid infrastructure plan, simple as that, right? And there are different solutions, sometimes even cheaper ones. I'm actually very happy that currently - I mean, now finally - we talk energy transition, right? Coming from the battery space, we have private investors coming and wanting to build battery storage, right? A lot of it. And for the first time, non-subsidized, right? No incumbent players involved. A lot of people complain: "Oh, PV is being subsidized, everything's subsidized, nothing works."

43:35 And now battery comes and it works without any subsidies, right? Financing was a topic, but out of the, the 1 gigawatt that we have under management, 900-something megawatts are merchant-financed, right? So financing works - it's getting more difficult with scale, of course, and the market needs to learn. And now the last step that is missing is aligning it with different grid levers, right? And now we're finally talking about what's the impact of a battery storage

44:07 on a certain location, because you cannot just ignore where it sits, right? To be honest, 2 years ago I would have said it doesn't matter where you place your battery storage. But we also learned a lot that it does matter, right. If you're on a specific node, if there are several batteries on the same node - and what's missing is clear rules on how to integrate that. You may have noticed that in media there is this "grid supportive," "grid friendly," "grid whatever" -

44:39 all these fancy words where nobody knows exactly what it means, but it all boils down to: "Hey guys, I'm a grid operator, you have to align with me, right, because I know the grid and you want to place an asset there, and we have to communicate what helps me and what makes my problem maybe even worse, right?" If you have these 5 occasions in a year with high load and the battery does the wrong thing in these 5

45:05 occasions, grid operators won't be happy, right, even if 99% of the time you do it right. There are studies showing that this is somehow happening exactly like this - the battery naturally does the right thing out of price formation and how it works in most markets, and there may be some occasions where you want to limit its activity or align it with the interest of the grid, right? So I think we're finally at the point of having all stakeholders at the table and saying: if I

45:34 place the battery there, and I've talked to all the players, we can build a subsidy-free thing that pushes higher renewables penetration and the grid operator is happy, right? So I think we're in a very special time, right? Maybe we look back in 2 years and say 2025 and 2026 were the years where we figured out how this whole decentralized stuff works, right? So that's actually one of the maybe the most interesting conundrums, and one where society

46:07 is still not so aware - indeed, there's this discrepancy between what the grid is able to do and what the volatility of renewables in terms of production is able to do. Those are the two dimensions that one needs to think about, and the battery somehow plays in between those two as well, and that's why placing this battery at the right points is key, as you just said. And one thing - I mean,

46:36 On the optimistic side - and of course I'm a possibilist as a person, so I think there's nothing that, if you want to do it, we will be able to do it - but yeah, of course there are plenty of hurdles in between. But it's possible from a physics standpoint; we can design the grids and incentives in such a way that the two will work in sync. The best way forward, I mean, that

47:01 should be possible from a mathematical standpoint, just thinking from the physics, right? Now, in terms of practical matters, we're already seeing in countries where there are so many DSOs, like in Germany and Switzerland, that these DSOs seem to have difficulties as well keeping up with this change, and especially adapting the pricing to real-time pricing, which I think would eventually be a required measure. And then having optimizers like yourselves - which would be an interesting segue

47:34 as well - having the optimization not only at a TSO level and a TSO level but also at a DSO level, prioritizing of course the DSO as a hard constraint, probably. What's your view on this? Yeah, I think what you described is the result of a centralized system design, right? Because where have 1 GW coal blocks been connected in the past? Where have 860 MW CCGTs been connected? Where have pump storages been connected? Certainly not in the

48:07 distribution grid, at that size. So the control - and that's now my interpretation of the past; I've not been involved in writing the regulations - the control was in the hands of the TSOs, right, of high voltage, because this is where the large volumes are connected. And so I think there is a missing link to lower grid levels, and lower grid levels have

48:40 never been asked - the DSOs - to do close to real-time monitoring of grid congestions, very accurate forecasting, etc. So when we engage with them, sometimes the data is not there, or they work with a lag of X minutes, where it's basically too late. Then the call is executed by the TSO, maybe not considering the DSOs below, because below 1 TSO there is a ton of DSOs, right? And it makes a difference if you're in the north of Germany or in

49:13 the south or in the east, or if you're close to a large power plant or next to a large consumer. So I think we've missed a bit of integration - we just stopped at the highest level and said: the TSOs know everything and they make the call. And now we realize that with smaller assets on DSO level, maybe this should have been set up differently, and that we need more data to make informed decisions, and

49:44 not only at the TSO level or whatever. So I think that's an energy market design issue that we have to solve, otherwise we will struggle and not find the best solution. The alternative is we just allow decentralized assets at specific points, or they will be limited randomly at different points, if we don't find a harmonious way of data exchange and rules, also among all DSOs. So I think - but that's again the same topic -

50:20 now we're talking energy in transition across all technical levels. Technically, I'm with you, no problem at all. The data is there; it's just a different way of working. Yeah, no, definitely. And are you involved at all in policy shaping and making, and are there any policy changes on the horizon that make you optimistic related to this topic? So actually, I myself not - I mean, we deliver position papers on topics

50:58 from an optimizer perspective on topics that touch our business model or our customers. And I'm sitting on the EPEX Exchange Council, raising the hand of - EPEX, the biggest power exchange in Europe, has a council built of members. All members of EPEX have to vote on who participates there. And this council acts like a sounding board, gives guidance on new products, or has to vote

51:37 on whether new products will be introduced at EPEX or not - so it's the voice of all members, basically. And of course our part there is to represent fully automated companies, because we have different needs than the top 4 in Germany with huge generation fleets, etc. It's a very diverse setup in that sense - players with a strong renewable focus, players with a strong conventional focus, us with a ton of batteries. So we try to provide input at

52:13 different forums, but we're not actively involved in policy shaping more than others. It's not our business; we provide advice out of operational experience. Makes sense. I mean, you talked about representing the fully automated players, and within these players I think one of the key messages you're pushing - rightly so - is transparency and how to guarantee that the promises you make to your customers are kept. Maybe can you elaborate on how

52:47 you - I think you announced an auditing with KPMG and others - can you maybe elaborate on that and how you think it will also evolve the market to make the whole promise transparent? Yeah, so on the one hand you have to consider that battery storage optimization is a pretty new discipline. We came up with cross-market optimization and presented it to the public, I think in 2022. So we signed our

53:16 first battery storage 2021, so it's pretty new, like 3.5 years old. And at some point in time, customers got confused by bankable forecasts being not aligned with daily optimization results, etc. And what you want to have is some kind of investment security, right? That has a lot of aspects, but one component is, of course, do I have the same forecast for the next 10 to 15 years, right? To build my business case. So we started actually very

53:53 early to share some of our data with players, right? But we found out that others without operational assets, and it's not good or bad, but they showed up with super high simulations and said, wow guys, we can do 300, I don't know, €1,000 per megawatt per year, etc. And on the other hand side, you also have very inexperienced asset owners, right? Because they maybe built their first battery, and quite a lot of them are actually building their first or second

54:28 battery, right? And so you don't have a lot of experience on both sides of the table, right? And that resulted in higher and higher forecasts. And we said, guys, it's kind of totally stupid. We know that it's not true because we have battery live data. We have 1-hour, we have 2-hour, we have close to 4-hour; we have Netherlands, we have Belgium, we have Austria, we have Germany, right? So we have that operational experience, and so we said the only

54:59 way to help mature the market is to make this stuff public, right? But in a way that we don't expose single asset performance, right? It's data of our clients. So to fulfill that quality criterion, we went with KPMG, an auditor, right? They have to stick to all the nitty-gritty rules - trust me, that's not fun. It took us like 8 or 9 months to go through it. So we have to provide the data, they ask you questions and say, hey, is

55:26 this representing the market, or are you suggesting - how do you avoid that you only take the good-performing assets and skip the rest? So we had to show them our contracts and the whole asset base, and so there are top-4 audit guidelines behind it. And so we published it since January this year. We will publish our two-hour storage index. I mean, I showed it at Get Inspired in Berlin. We've also shared the two-hour performance,

55:57 which we're currently certifying with KPMG. Can you just elaborate on this hourly performance, because I'm not aware and listeners might also not be? What do you mean with that? Yeah, so in the old world, 3 years or 2 years ago and even longer, you had battery storages designed to deliver frequency services, so mainly FCR. And to do that, you had to have 1 hour of storage duration. So 10 megawatts of power, 10 megawatt hours of capacity, right? How long does it

56:31 take to charge your battery from 0 to 100% is an hour. And the same for discharging. And that was the most cost-efficient dimension in capex terms, so investment-wise, to deliver frequency containment reserve. That's why in the past, all battery storages were 1-hour. Even longer ago, half an hour was OK, so 10 megawatt, 5 megawatt hours - it took you just half an hour to fully charge or discharge the battery. We meanwhile see

57:05 in all markets no shorter duration than 2 hours, so 10 megawatt, 20 megawatt hours. So it takes you 2 hours to fully charge or discharge the battery storage, and that of course comes with different revenue potential. So 2-hour storage - first of all, it's newer technology. The old ones we had were NMC; the new ones are LFP, or lithium iron phosphate, and have more cycles, etc. So these are fundamentally different configurations, let's call it like this. So we agreed

57:40 with KPMG to cluster around 1-hour storages as the old world - so 0.9 to 1.5 hours - and from 1.5 hours duration to 3.5 hours we have the second cluster, which represents the assets currently under construction. And if we ever go above 3.5 hours storage, we will add another cluster for longer durations, right? Otherwise you cannot compare the performance, right? So if you build a 2-hour storage that is under construction, you

58:14 look at our 2-hour performance for comparable assets. If you have an old 1-hour, you look at the other. If you have longer duration, you look at the upper end of our 2-hour index. So it's very important to be fair and transparent in comparing assets. So that was the idea: whoever has a battery storage, no matter if it's optimized by us, by somebody else, not optimized at all, under construction, whatever - you go to our website,

58:41 you check the numbers, you can download the KPMG report. In there is written the minimum performance, so the worst-performing asset, the best-performing asset, and the volume-weighted portfolio performance. So that one small exceptionally good-performing asset doesn't skew your overall performance. But it's all described in the documents and available for public download, and we already see that this gives a lot of confidence to asset owners, right? They look at the

59:13 old forecasts, the bankable forecasts, they look at the real performance, and say, OK, it has been slightly above, and they ask and say, oh, I understand why a forecast has to be slightly lower, because there is stuff like volatility that cannot be forecasted accurately. So it really helps educating the market, and it's basically - I would argue - impossible meanwhile in Germany to come up with a totally made-up number, right? Because a client will go on our website and say, I made 3,000, I don't

59:46 know, in May annualized, and you say you can do 800. Now tell me how this works. But other markets are at this level, right? They've been in Poland recently, in Warsaw. Same story again, no operational track record, and it's about show me the high numbers. But you know, there is fear because there is no operational data, there is no asset in cross market. We recommend to look into other countries, right? If you

1:00:21 don't find your dream car or the price of your dream car in Austria, you look what the Audi or whatever you like costs in Germany, right? Or what a similar car costs. So I think you get the story, right? Operational data is just way more valuable than just simulation stuff. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, we're at the inception stages, as you said. Do you know, on top of your head, like what's the deployed battery storage capacity right now in

1:00:47 key markets, or in Europe, or in Germany? I would have to lie. I haven't looked up the numbers for quite some weeks, but I think it was like 2-ish gigawatts of grid scale in Germany, but I always mess it up - there is so much residential in Germany, right. You do not do any residential, you always do more stationary and co-located, right? That's the. And then, with businesses we have

1:01:16 a VPP with a partner where we will have by end of the year some several thousand small batteries aggregated, but our core focus is grid scale - so larger batteries, single digit megawatts up to three digit. So that's the sweet spot at the moment. But we have also seen utility-scale battery storages live since 2 or 3 years. Technology-wise, not a problem. And will there be - I think there was

1:01:51 200 gigawatts in the pipeline in Germany alone? 500. 500. All right, so how much do you think will actually be built, and how fast? So we shared it very transparently - we have some really good developer customers, and we assume, out of what the really smart people make out of the pipelines, that it will be a single digit percentage, rather a small one. Because if a

1:02:26 good player who knows the business and has done, I don't know, 15 years of PV before, knows the grid operators and how the game works with getting grid access, achieves a medium single digit percentage, then you have some cowboys out there - not Germans, right? So fans outside of Germany who give it a shot. So I think we will land, I don't know, at 10 gigawatts-ish out of the 500. It's just, I

1:03:01 had a chat with, hopefully, a soon-to-be customer, and they have no 15-year PV background, and the only way to do it for them is to send grid applications. That's just the only way. It's like sales, right? If you talk traditional software sales, everybody knows you have to fill your pipeline, you will have a hit rate at every stage, and at the end there is 30%-ish

1:03:33 depending on where you start, to track. And that's the same. I think grid operators have just not designed it for this, right - with the first come, first served, etc. Because who built larger assets in the past? Incumbents, and even two decades before, they had been one company before they were unbundled. So again, the result of system design in my world. Nothing bad with it, no bad intentions on both sides. But not properly designed a

1:04:09 system to handle all those grid requests. Makes sense, yeah. And let's talk milestones. You have achieved already quite some milestones. The Series B was a bit back, and then you can share some numbers so that the listeners also get a sense of the size of where you are and what's your plan - where do you want to be in a few years' time? Unfortunately our plan changes - not our North Star, right, of being a global battery optimizer - but

1:04:41 you know, when we raised our Series B of €25.5 million 1.5 years ago, the idea was to have some countries in Europe, get Europe to break even basically, as a stronghold or as a foundation, and then scale globally. And then suddenly we work with a mind-blowing partner, Optimus Energy in Greece, on 270 megawatts. We work with an extremely good partner in Spain and Portugal, Nexus Energy. We work with Ecoortes - super matching DNA - in Poland, etc. So Europe goes crazy in terms of battery

1:05:22 storage, right? And so we always move back to even more countries. We get requests from Romania - you cannot imagine. I've spent quite some time in Bucharest in my past. But yeah, so the thing is, you have these maturing markets, right, and the UK was actually by far first in Europe. On the continent you have them stacked now, right, based on market maturities, and whenever we

1:05:57 say, OK, in 1.5 years we look, or we start looking now more into the US - it's like, here's another country in Europe, here's another country, here's another country, right? So Europe keeps us quite busy. Greece, for example, was not on our roadmap ideas, and we have - I mean, the biggest asset there is 150 megawatts, 300 megawatt hours, so quite sizable. Europe keeps us busy, the goal is global, right? We do the first

1:06:27 step with the Japanese partner, one of our shareholders, which will be announced soon. So if we have access to the Japanese power exchange, we're building the first forecasts, etc. So Japan will be our first global market. But yes, for the US, we have to first take care of our home continent, let's call it like that, before we do a bigger step.

1:07:01 geographically is quite far away? You maintain the product quality and the customer support required. Actually, that was the plan from the beginning. I would say we're finally where we wanted to be, right? 5.5 years ago when founding the company. As all of us have a tech software background, the idea was to scale with technology instead of people. And what we've achieved meanwhile - I had a chat some days ago with Wolfgang, co-founder and CTO -

1:07:35 we improved some bidding for the optimization, and suddenly the bidding improvement has impact in Germany, in Austria, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in France. So we achieve this leverage platform-wise. Strategically, one thing is risk diversification, revenue diversification, entering new countries, but the other is really leveraging the fact that markets, especially on the continent - skip GB for now - but on the continent are harmonized. Why do you skip GB? Because they

1:08:09 never wanted to be harmonized with the rest of Europe. The market works fundamentally differently. You don't have a single shared order book, so you have different pools with different liquidity. You have auctions organized by two NEMOs, the two power exchanges. You have different ancillary services, so what the TSOs request from you is different from the continent - some similar, some not at all. Connected by interconnectors, explicit capacity auctions instead of implicit, which

1:08:45 we have with SSTEC and SIDC on the continent. So they just did not participate in more than a decade of harmonization. That means in terms of scaling and geographic expansion they are different, and I think that's also the reason why you rarely see UK players on the continent. They rather look at Australia and the US. Some do, like Octopus or Kraken, but it's a bigger jump than you would assume

1:09:16 in the first step. Other than that, we scale with technology. Some markets are easier and some are more complex, but typically it takes us some months to build something rock solid for a new country, which is mind-blowing, and that was the plan. Yeah, congrats. And switching gears to fleets and smart charging - the podcast is also about that topic. I'd be curious, and I also want to say thank you for

1:09:46 your help so far as advisor of RiDERgy - it's been super helpful. What's your view on fleets, electrification, smart charging, especially how it fits with Inspired? And if you have any thoughts related to the potential that is there for bi-directional charging and these types of topics. Yeah, I'm a passionate EV driver since nearly 10 years. Actually, a lot of people don't know that we had at Inspired

1:10:20 a first smart charging solution within an Austrian utility, around 4 years ago, I think it was live in 2021. Back then players were not even sure if smart charging and load management were the same or not. What most players meant with load management was cutting the peaks - peak shaving - and what we meant with smart charging was power-price-optimized charging of a vehicle.

1:10:52 That didn't scale back then. Not enough volatility, not enough awareness, no spot price index tariffs, not enough charging infrastructure, to be honest. There were not too many CPOs - charge point operators - back then. So I think we were a bit early. And don't get me wrong, but algorithmically it's a piece of cake compared to a battery, right? Smart charging - that will change with vehicle-to-grid, of course - but purely charging is,

1:11:27 you get it basically for free now with your spot-priced tariff. So that's the background. You can assume that I'm a firm believer in electric vehicles. I think the biggest problem in scaling so far, or why we are not further progressed, is that the mobility industry underestimated the energy industry - who owns the metering point, what's the role of the supplier of that metering point, how does it work with balancing, how

1:12:04 do you influence the forecast? I think we've seen a lot of players who thought: just connect somewhere and it's done. And then it's like, oh, if you have 10 charge points, sorry, my supply situation is different. And then, oh, it's one meter - that doesn't work to have two different tariffs on the same meter - and all that stuff. That's what I've heard and learned over the last years. So I think

1:12:32 the biggest potential from my point of view at the moment is commercial or corporate fleets, where you have control over the vehicles. Because if you have residential players, maybe they're not so happy if you mess around with their €80,000 battery. But if it's company cars, transporters, electric buses - they're typically owned, operated, or leased by the company. So I think you also get to some volume

1:13:07 That's interesting. So I think that should be a thing. It's also easier to forecast the fleet than single assets, right? And, out of a portfolio thing, and I think you can get realistically to vehicle-to-grid at some point in time, because who on earth at home would buy a €2,500–3,000 charger for vehicle-to-grid? So I think residential-wise, we're not there yet, but fleet-wise, I think there are a lot of players with large fleets already, and from Inspired's

1:13:44 point of view, as soon as vehicle-to-grid is getting interesting, because we don't care if it's 64 containers standing still at the site or if it's 200 cars that can be connected and disconnected - optimization-wise it's very similar, not the same, but similar. And will there be a conflict in your view, once we get to bidirectional, in terms of the number of batteries that will be deployed? Will there be a competition between stationary batteries and the mobile batteries?

1:14:14 Will there be a cannibalization effect? For sure on the energy side. But to be honest, I cannot judge it, if the cars are connected at the right point in time. If they will all be connected during noon, where it makes sense energy-wise, then you have very often longer durations. So it also depends on how fast the chargers are and what the cars are capable of charging and discharging, and what

1:14:47 the OEMs accept, right? Just if you have a 400 kW DC charger - I don't know if they would be happy if you drained the battery empty in some minutes of an electric vehicle and then charged it again in another 10 minutes. So I think a lot of it depends on the available flexibility in terms of power and MWh or GWh or whatever. But yes, they should play the same game, and will face the

1:15:19 same topics, right? At some point in time a DSO will come up and say, "Guys, sorry, on this node you will not charge 3 MW and you will not discharge 3 MW at this point in time." So I think it should be fully integrated and hopefully profit from learnings from the grid-scale rollout. I have no doubts that this will work, it's just a matter of time. Sounds good. On this hopeful note,

1:15:53 I'd like to ask you if you have some final messages for the listeners, and also how people can engage with you best. With me as a person or with Inspired? Both. Engaging with us is easy - as soon as you're involved in the battery space, you will sooner or later come across us at some events, etc. You can always drop us a line. The fastest way to reach me

1:16:25 is WhatsApp - that's how my wife reaches me, so I have to check if I get the message. LinkedIn is tricky; I get a ton of spam and I just realized that I didn't answer things from 3 months ago, or even longer, which was a bit embarrassing for me. But I think you will figure out how to reach out to me or my colleagues.

1:16:53 You reach out to Claudio and he drops me a WhatsApp.

1:16:58 Yeah, happy to make an introduction. It makes sense.

1:17:04 Yeah, and do you have an inspiring last message to share? I can just say: if you're not active yet in the energy industry, this is the most exciting time, I think, since decades. And it's a unique opportunity, no matter in what role, right? If you're talking about electric mobility, if you talk about battery storage supply, whatever it is, I think this is really the time where we have a paradigm

1:17:39 shift in energy, right? So I think, if you have a chance to get involved with energy, the time is now. And I hope we will all be very proud in a decade or two to tell how much work we put into the new energy system 20 years ago. So that's why I love my job, right? Energy never gets boring, and now it's extremely exciting. Unbelievable. Definitely agree with you. Thank you, Jürgen, for your time and your

1:18:12 energy. Keep it up. And have a good evening. Thanks, you too. This was Jürgen from Inspired. This conversation showed that batteries are not just pieces of hardware - they are market participants. The crucial advantage comes from fast automation that moves from measurement to forecast, from forecast to bid, and from bid to dispatch. Performance can be judged with simple, concrete metrics: the capture rate compared to day-ahead prices, the time it takes to place a trade, and the cost of forecast errors. Value is never the same

1:18:52 everywhere. It follows local congestion, imbalance volatility, and country-specific rules. Merchant battery projects can work when a proper risk book is in place, including cap and floor structures, mixed revenue streams, and early pre-qualification for ancillary services. Success in the field depends on integration details, solid EMS contracts, defined fallback states, good test plans, and reliable telemetry. Clean data and clear audit trails build trust with lenders and with regulators. Co-locating storage with wind or solar can add options, but grid limits and curtailment can remove those gains just as

1:19:38 quickly. A practical next step is to automate end-to-end in a single market zone and scale only after the same KPIs hold up outside of backtests. What comes next is more flexibility at the distribution level, faster settlement cycles, and tighter performance guarantees. It was a very complex episode and shows the level of sophistication that Jürgen and Inspired bring to the market and to the table. I'm very excited to have him advising us at RiDERgy and to keep collaborating, and hopefully scale together as well.

1:20:17 Solutions like this to fleets. And thanks for listening to Smart Charge by RiDERgy, and see you in the next episode. Stay charged.