Rethink Energy Podcast

In this final episode of the Rethink Energy Podcast, consultant Ed Ho makes a return appearance to conclude our discussion of the nuclear power topic. This time, the main topic is the near and medium-term outlook for the industry's development, as it heads towards a revival across the West.

• The US will default to a nuclear-centric energy strategy as nuclear enjoys bipartisan support from policymakers - unlike either renewables or fossil fuel plants. More broadly worldwide, the growing need to pair intermittent renewables with energy storage is eroding their perceived cost advantage over nuclear energy - although this depends on local wind and solar conditions.
• China now accounts for 30% of global manufacturing, and still growing - but its future competitive advantage, under the hood, will be very different in future compared to today and yesterday.
• 144 GWh of energy storage supply deals were signed between Chinese OEMs and overseas customers in the first five months of 2025 alone - up over 400% year-on-year, and with only 3.4 GWh of it destined for the US.

• Flying cars are being brought to market by several major EV manufacturers in 2025 and 2026 - and their demand for weight efficiency will boost adoption of autonomous driving and all-solid-state batteries, even if those technologies are too expensive for standard EVs.
• Chinese OEMs have unveiled a new tranche of proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers as the SNEC exhbition - bringing cost-effective green hydrogen one step closer.
• Virtual Power plant adoption is heading towards a scale of perhaps 10% of grid generating capacity by 2030 and 20% by 2040 - with a mutually reinforcing relationship between VPP adoption, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) payments, and EV market penetration likely to manifest in future.

• Rio Tinto has announced a further $900 million investment into lithium mining in Chile - we discuss the inexorable logic that today's 2x overcapacity will give way, due to constantly growing demand, to a second lithium shortage within the next 10 years.
• JinkoSolar's whitepaper on their latest TOPCon solar module, which boasts 24.8% efficiency, demonstrates that technological progress in silicon PV has yet to slow - but there are only five years left before the theoretical Shockley-Queisser limit on photovoltaic performance per square meter is effectively reached. After that, perovskites will be the primary remaining avenue for further research.

• With Republicans sabotaging renewables and Democrats bound to push out fossil fuels, nuclear stands to benefit as the 'least interfered with' option. President Trump has signed a new EO upping the Biden 2050 target of 200 GW, to 400 GW of nuclear power - to include 10 constructions beginning by 2030, and this is backed by data center hyperscalers, which combine massive future electricity demand growth and the necessary private funds to support nuclear projects.
• California curtailed almost 1 TWh of wind and solar in the month of April, even as batteries ramp up to discharge 10 GW each evening.
• The China Hydropower Research Institute has released a sweeping report into renewable energy capex - in which the most surprising finding is that compressed-air energy storage is cheaper upfront than lithium energy storage batteries, if there's a natural salt cavern to use - and scarcely more expensive even with artificial excavation.

• In this episode Toronto-based energy consultant and analyst Ed Ho joins us to discuss the present situation of the nuclear power industry - and the prospects for future deployments.
• We ask - what is the "true" cost of nuclear power - is it more like the recent Western new-build overruns on cost and construction time which resulted in levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) north of $150 per MWh due to repeated overruns, or is the surface-level $40 per MWh for nuclear power on South Korea's power market more realistic?

• The discussion also covers prospects for several major future markets such as Poland and the US - and the potential for South Korea's KEPCO to develop projects in other countries as it has so successfully with the Barakah power plant in the UAE.

Both the EV power battery industry and the energy storage industry have grown over 60% year-on-year in Q1, according to various statistics - but even a fourfold growth in demand could be acommodated by the existing production capacity of lithium, as the energy storage segment can respond to future raw material price hikes by adopting alternative chemistries like vanadium-flow and sodium-ion.

China will implement a major new power market reform next month, introducing Contracts for Difference (CfDs) and an ancillary services market which will greatly increase the revenue of battery energy projects. Renewable additions will slow down compared to the immense boom of the past two years, but the battery energy storage industry needed this - it needs to switch to organic market-driven growth, rather than an unsustainable co-location requirement based paradigm which resulted in poor-quality installations and a 50% utilization rate.

The biggest consequence for the rest of the world will simply be that China's power prices are not significantly shifting as it shifts from coal plus hydro, over to new energy. China's competitive advantage is going nowhere.

• South Korea is to develop a 3.2 GW, $13 billion offshore wind complex - which will also require transmission expansions to deliver power to load centers.
• Poland's nuclear development deal with Bechtel and Westinghouse has been renewed - with as much as $51 billion and six reactors at stake, with wind and solar possibly insufficient as the main national energy strategy.
• The US' battery supply from China is obstructed by tariffs - while US and Indian manufacturing efforts have yet to reach anything like the necessary scale to replace China.

In this episode we spoke to Tina Anderson, Head of Sales at Hystar, a Norwegian electrolyzer manufacturer with 100 MW production capacity - growing towards 4.5 GW. We cover topics including ramping up and down to react to electricity prices - as well as providing demand response services to the grid, the production cost of hydrogen electrolysis, and the policy environment in Europe.