This time on Cleaning Up, Michael hosts Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, one of the UK's greatest living physicists, for a fascinating and detailed dive into the UK's energy storage requirements as it moves towards a fully carbon-free grid. 

Sir Chris is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and a former Director-General of CERN. At CERN he steered the funding and commissioning of its Large Hadron Collider, and as a theoretical particle physicist, Sir Chris predicted the existence of the very particle - the Higgs Boson - that the Large Hadron Collider went on to help discover. Sir Chris is likely the only person ever to have been knighted for "services to particle physics."

In the last few years Sir Chris has been busy leading a forthcoming Royal Society study on large-scale energy storage as part of the net-zero transition. He and Michael discuss the significance of storage to a newly configured, renewable grid, the likely cost of stored electricity, and the role of salt caverns in hosting hydrogen stores.

Solving for Storage - Ep122: Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith

Once a week, Michael Liebreich and Bryony Worthington have a conversation with a leader in clean energy, mobility, climate finance or sustainable development. Informative, inspiring and fun!

Cleaning Up is supported by Capricorn Investment Group.

Technology

Tech News

Podcasting

Gadgets

Software How-To

Business

Investing

Careers

Management & Marketing

Business News

Shopping

News

Entrepreneurship

News Commentary

As everyone knows, battery prices are plummeting and manufacturing volumes are soaring, whether for EVs or for grid-connected storage. And everyone knows there's a problem: only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. The rest go to landfill, right? Wrong. This week's guest on Cleaning Up is the world's preeminent expert on battery recycling. Hans Eric Melin is the Founder and Managing Director of Circular Energy Storage. 

Circular Energy Storage is a London-based data collection and analytics consultancy focused on the lithium-ion battery end-of-life market. They help companies and organisations in the entire battery value chain to take better decisions in everything that relates to reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries. They do this by continuously collecting, analysing and publishing data from all parts of the value chain worldwide and by working actively with customers in their strategy and business development.

Battery Recycling Is Here - But Where Are The Batteries? - Ep165: Hans Eric Melin

Last week the leading lights of Europe's electricity industry gathered for the annual Eurelectric Power Summit at the Lagonissi Beach Resort just outside Athens. The conference - under the hashtag this year of #lights on - lasted two days and covered the key issues facing Europe's and the world's power sectors. Two topics in particular stood out: the need to accelerate the build out of transmission, and the pressures and opportunities offered by digitization and AI. At the event, Eurelectric published a brace of reports on these two topics. On the final day of the conference, Michael caught up with Leonhard Birnbaum, Chairman and CEO of German utility and distribution grid operator E.ON and President of Eurelectric, on a sunny and windy terrace just outside the conference centre to discuss all this and more.

#LightsOn - Live from the Eurelectric Power Summit 2024 in Athens - Ep164: Leonhard Birnbaum

China's policies that direct capital towards cleaner industries have been game changing, and this week we're continuing the China theme, sharing two conversations Bryony had earlier this month at a conference at Xiamen University in Fujian Province. China's role in the clean energy transition could not be more important. The think tank Ember's latest report on the state of the global electricity transition states: over half of the world's new wind and solar power capacity last year was added in China, and together with hydro and nuclear, clean electricity in China now meets 35% of their electricity demand. And yet, the scale and the nature of the Chinese economy is so enormous it's hard to grasp, the majority of which is still powered by roughly 1000 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations, half of the global total. The focus of the conference was on a specific lever that could help China further along its decarbonisation path: the repowering of existing coal stations with clean sources of heat.

Ep163: Staffan Qvist & Dr. Yaoli Zhang

In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, we find how much and how much more governments would have to spend for hydrogen to live up to its hype. This audio blog is adapted from a piece Michael wrote at the end of last year for BloombergNEF, entitled "Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions", which estimated that hitting the Hydrogen Energy Ministerial target of 90 million tonnes of clean energy by 2030 would require subsidies of at least $2.3 trillion to be on the table right now, while the actual figure at the end of last year was 1/10th of that. Although the figures have changed a bit since then, the message remains the same: the subsidy gap remains in the multiple trillions of dollars. It should not therefore be surprising that the news is full of projects being cancelled and delayed. In fact, that will be one of the main hydrogen stories through to 2030 and beyond.

Audioblog 13: Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions

Up this week is Simon Holmes à Court, the Australian investor and philanthropist with a passion for using data to change the world. 

In 2022, the federal elections in Australia delivered an upset, as around a third of the electorate turned their back on the established parties and voted in seven new independent MPs taking the total to 10. Simon was responsible for a crowdfunding initiative - Climate 200 - that supported 23 candidates in all, pledging to act on climate, political integrity and gender discrimination. He remains very involved in the challenge of pivoting Australia from a fossil fuel based economy to a clean energy superpower.

Solving for Storage - Ep122: Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith

Download our free app to listen on your phone