Decoding the Future of Coordinated Power Systems with Mark O’Malley

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Last Updated on: 28th March 2025, 08:35 pm

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mark O’Malley, Leverhulme professor of Power Systems at the Imperial College of London, and founder and research lead for the Global Power Systems Consortium, which is the leading organization trying to figure out how to operate grids as we approach 100% renewables. This is the second half of the conversation, lightly edited. The first half is available here.

Michael Barnard [MB]: Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. As always, we’re sponsored by TFIE Strategy Inc., a firm which helps investment funds and firms figure out where to spend their money wisely and with the most profit to deal with the climate solutions space. My guest today is Mark O’Malley, Leverhulme professor of Power Systems at the Imperial College of London, among other hats he wears. We’re returning for the second half of our conversation.

It strikes me that I spent time with Cornelis Plett, who is currently the global head of HVDC for DNV. I think he actually has a PhD. We discovered his PhD thesis advisor was a buddy of yours from Imperial College. Cornelis, who worked with your colleague from Imperial College as his thesis advisor, shared with me how HVDC has what I would call grid-forming capabilities. They can slice up and create the HVAC—the alternating current curve, frequency, and voltage—and they have substantial power behind them to accomplish that. As I think through this, it strikes me that in places with extensive HVAC infrastructure, like China, there emerge grid-forming opportunities with enough power to actually manage the grid.

Mark O’Malley [MO]: Yeah, no, that’s true. And again, it’s not an area I’m a specialist in, but there’s no doubt about it: HVDC is part of the solution. The other problem then becomes, how do you manage an AC and DC system together? That’s a really interesting question, and again, nobody really knows exactly how to do it yet.

There’s a large amount of research being done, and lots of people are looking at it, but practical examples aren’t widely available. I’d guess China is probably the leader in this area—I suspect they are—but I don’t know enough about it, to be honest with you, to say for certain.

But definitely, when you mix AC and DC systems, you encounter some very interesting challenges.

[MB]: There’s actually something interesting that’s emerging in parallel, which you’re probably aware of—and I think you’ll be dragged into it over time. Last May, the 27 energy ministers of the EU got together and said, “We need to create an EU grid planning organization and establish a meshed HVDC grid overlaying Europe, and plan and fund it.”

So now, through this new parliament, the new set of MEPs, and a new agenda, that’s one of the initiatives that’s being assembled. Policies, laws, and structures are beginning to form around it, and the organization itself is starting to be articulated. It’s going to spin off all sorts of things, including better grid planning tools, because right now the situation is fragmented in terms of planning and simulation tools. Currently, they’re either too coarse or not fine-grained enough, and many don’t yet incorporate some of the things we’ve been discussing.

It’s going to be very interesting to watch over the next five years as this emerges. I think it will become something heavily informed by some of the work you’re doing within the consortium.

[MO]: Yeah. So look, I think this whole HVDC–AC interaction didn’t feature heavily in the research agenda initially, but it looks like, in the new version, it’ll get a little bit more highlighting, for sure.

To be quite honest, though, remember that this stuff doesn’t get built quickly. It’s a huge issue, but it may not be a problem that we really need to solve for another five or ten years. That might be why the research agenda originally focused more on short-term concerns. But it’s definitely in there now.

Your European point is interesting. China can do something like this because it has a certain political structure that allows it. I’m not sure Europe can do it as easily—trying to get that to work sounds difficult politically. It is a good idea, though. If you put a huge DC overlay across the entire region, it does make sense.

But there’s an interesting issue with electricity—I think you probably know this. Most countries or regions tend to become uncomfortable once imports reach around 10%, because it becomes a security-of-supply concern. I don’t know the exact rule, but someone told me it’s around 10%. Beyond that, a bit of tension arises. Countries like to be self-sufficient, which is understandable. So, I’m not sure if an HVDC overlay fully addresses that.

[MB]: Well, we also have the secondary effect—I’m watching this play out in the United States with LNG exports. Right now, the United States has become one of the largest LNG exporters in the world. They’re bringing online about 26 million tons per annum of new LNG export capacity this year.

One of the things that happened there—and this directly pertains to the point we’re discussing—is that domestic gas prices began to be impacted during the European energy crisis. With even more capacity coming online, the historically cheap natural gas prices in the United States are now tagged to global natural gas prices, creating inflationary pressure.

Now, Norway, as another example, is heavily interconnected with the rest of Europe. But now they’re rejecting those interconnections.

[MO]: The government fell apparently. Is that right.

[MB]: The government just fell, and that’s because, once again, the historically low price of their massive surplus of electricity suddenly became pegged to European demand levels—so domestic prices were rising. This isn’t a power systems engineering question, but it’s a fundamental issue.

[MO]: Economics 101—yeah. What always amazes me—I’ll digress a bit here—is that I used to live in Seattle, at the University of Washington, back around 1999 or 2000. It was one of the many times I spent in the U.S.—a great time, we thoroughly enjoyed it.

I remember at that time there was discussion about—you’re in Vancouver, so you know all about this—the BPA, Bonneville Power Administration. I don’t know the full history of BPA, but BPA is a federal organization of some description. They built dams that are federally owned, and essentially the local area got the energy. Because those investments were made so long ago and have been fully paid down, electricity in the Northwest is now just dirt cheap.

But California is power-hungry, and if you start sending that energy to California, you’ll level up the prices. And there were mass protests in the Northwest because people didn’t want to import California’s high electricity prices. But that’s basic economics.

If you talk to a really good economist, they’ll tell you there’s an overall benefit from doing it. It just depends on how the money is redistributed. Interconnection is fundamentally a good thing. Sure, there are local winners and losers, but overall, for society, it’s a much better outcome.

[MB]: Energy costs go down everywhere on and.

[MO]: Therefore it’s good for society. Yeah.

[MB]: And the Norwegians aren’t buying that anymore.

[MO]: You know, the political environment in the U.S. at the moment is such that—I mean, it’s interesting—I wonder if they’ve done Economics 101. I suspect they haven’t. In fact, I think if they did, they’d probably fail.

[MB]: Well, Biden and company did that—they said, “Let’s pause new LNG exports,” and there were multiple factors involved, but a lot of it was about domestic energy prices. Of course, the Trump administration was just “export, export,” because they didn’t care about local energy prices—because of the rich people. But that’s a different story.

Let’s get back to power systems and the consortium. So there are six categories of questions, and a lot of questions overall. In the last version you sent me, there were 59 questions. Are there still around 59-ish?

[MO]: Yeah. No, no—it’s going to be “ish.” I’d say it’ll probably be lower, and I think it’ll be lower for various reasons. I’ll give you those reasons.

First, there will be some new questions. Actually, you’ve talked about HVDC—there’ll probably be two more on that. Data centers have now become a big issue, and there might be questions about them. Of course, we can always roll these new topics into the existing questions, but whether you have a separate question on it is, in many ways, just semantics. Still, it’s important for the research agenda as a whole. It’s a very important document, even though it’s not a detailed one—it mainly provides signposts. And for political or communication reasons, you might want to clearly signal something like data centers. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a question or two specifically about them.

But overall, the number of questions will probably decrease. First of all, I wouldn’t say any of the questions, per se, have been fully answered, because none of these questions will ever be fully solved. There’ll always be some interval part of the question left. It’s not that kind of situation. But certainly, progress has been made. We’ll likely start amalgamating and merging questions to reflect that progress.

Also, in the original document, there was consensus among a group of people who worked very hard on it—and as you know, a consensus document is never the best document. So there were some gremlins left in there that I’m going to take care of now as I’m updating it. There will definitely be some streamlining.

If I had to guess, I’d say the list of around 59 questions will come down closer to about 50.

[MB]: One of the things you said was that some of the questions have mostly been answered—they’ve been answered to a sufficient level. So, what are the top two, or perhaps two to five, that come to mind for you that have already been answered?

[MO]: Well, I was thinking about this during my bike ride—how I’d answer that question. And again, this research agenda is currently being reviewed by my friends and colleagues around the world, and it has to go through a few more iterations. So right now, I’m giving you my opinion in the middle of that process.

I think what’s happened with some of the questions—let’s say on the academic research side—is that we’ve definitely produced the tools, methods, and techniques required. But there’s a translation needed from academia into the system operators, and that takes time. The GPST has these research questions, but it also has Implementation Councils across the six areas. Simply put, the idea is that once the research questions are solved, the Implementation Councils take them to be applied.

I suspect some of the questions have been solved from a low TRL point of view, but not yet from an implementation perspective. We’re end-to-end here—these research questions aren’t solved simply when someone publishes an academic journal paper. We need them solved and applied. So, for us, a research question isn’t solved until there’s proof of principle and actual deployment. That’s why a lot of these questions are still open. I don’t think we’re going to knock many off the list yet because implementation hasn’t fully occurred.

In terms of specific areas, on the planning side, which I mentioned earlier, many methodology parts of those 10 or 12 questions are largely solved, at least in my opinion. We’ll have to test that further.

I’d also like to clarify something, especially if this goes out broadly: We’re not claiming to have all the answers. I’m not Moses coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. We’re completely open to comments. If someone thinks these research questions are already answered or that we’ve missed other important ones, please let us know. That’s only good news.

But I think many of the methodologies, particularly around planning, are definitely in good shape. Regarding the inverter-based resources (IBRs), I was reading a draft report by NREL this morning on the plane, and I learned about some interesting global developments. With the IBR question, a lot of demonstrations have now been done, so we’ve certainly made progress. However, some of the low TRL aspects aren’t there at all yet, meaning there’s still a long way to go.

There are also specialist questions—for example, protection. Remember I mentioned earlier that IBRs couldn’t produce large fault currents? So that leads to questions about how we protect systems, which have only seriously been looked at in the past few years. We’re just scratching the surface in some of these areas. But at least we’re scratching the surface, so progress is happening.

When it comes to control rooms of the future, there have definitely been efforts made. I’ll call out one example: 50Hertz in Germany is working on an interesting project where they believe a modular control center could be the solution. If that works out, it’s a big step forward because it fundamentally changes what solutions might look like. Now, I did speak to a CEO of another system operator who used to work in this area when they were younger, and they said it would never work—so it’s still up in the air. But 50Hertz is certainly making practical progress, and that’s encouraging.

[MB]: Let’s just call that out, because one of the things I look at is SAIFI and SAIDI—the fundamental metrics of grid reliability across different grids. People keep saying, “Renewables aren’t reliable,” and I respond, “Well, Denmark and Germany average about 13 minutes of outages per customer per year, whereas North America averages two to four hours.”

Germany has very high penetrations of renewables—well over 40%, and I think they’re now around 50% of annual energy supply. A significant amount of that comes through HVDC transmission from the North Sea, along with extensive local inverters because they were early adopters during the Energiewende, with community wind and rooftop solar.

So they’ve got the complex grid of the future, yet it’s insanely reliable by global standards. I always point to them and say, “They’re doing something right.”

And Denmark—they’ve reached points where wind alone met 140% of total national demand for many hours, even exporting the excess. Yet they still maintain just 13 minutes of outages per customer per year on average.

[MO]: I think it’s important, though, to point out that Germany is in the middle of continental Europe, and Denmark, like I said, is part of two large systems. The system you should use is Ireland—I’m not bragging—or Great Britain, because they’re synchronously isolated. And Ireland has a very, very reliable power system.

Intel is just about to open a new fab plant there—Fab 30 or whatever they’re calling it now, I’m not sure. That’s a significant investment, maybe around five billion dollars. They’re probably not going to do something like that in a country with an unreliable power system. And we have over 40% wind and solar.

So wind and solar aren’t unreliable—that’s simply not true. They’re just different. That’s all there is to it: they’re different.

[MB]: I think I have to change my talking point. I’m spending so much time talking to people about your accent, between one thing and another—working with Eddie O’Connor’s group around the book and things like that—I think I need to start using Ireland as my example.

[MO]: That’s right. You should definitely use Ireland as your example for reliability. But you know, the same people who claim systems are unreliable tend to come from systems that are actually very unreliable.

In the United States, one of their states recently had a major blackout, and it wasn’t due to wind or solar, even though they tried to blame it on that. It actually had to do with the gas freezing, didn’t it? So, you know, let’s call a spade a spade. People might not want to accept this, but that’s the way it is.

[MB]: You mentioned Texas earlier.

[MO]: Well, I didn’t say that was Texas.

[MB]: No, earlier you mentioned Texas, which did have its gas freeze and its nuclear plants freeze a few years ago. But in the nine or ten years preceding that, I was tracking the SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index), and Texas used to have the worst grid reliability in the continental United States—around four hours of outages per customer per year.

As the percentage of wind and solar ramped up each year, their grid reliability improved rapidly. They’re now approaching the U.S. average, which is about two hours and twenty minutes. It was fascinating to watch, especially given how many commentaries from Texas kept insisting wind and solar are unreliable.

[MO]: Yeah, but it may not be cause and effect—you know that. No, please don’t assert cause and effect on that.

[MB]: No, I was just observing an amusing and ironic point.

[MO]: We digress—but let’s digress. Why not talk about reliability? Let’s discuss that, right?

We seem to have gotten ourselves stuck in this impossible-to-escape situation, which goes as follows: If I went up to a politician in Great Britain, where I am, and said, “Listen, we should reduce the reliability of the power system,” there’d be absolute consternation. They would say, “No way,” without hesitation.

The point I’m trying to make is that nobody ever wants to back down from a certain level of reliability. They think that’s inherently bad. But if that continues, it’s just going to cost us more and more money. There’s a balance to be struck, and you could argue that, in certain systems, we’ve overspent. That’s one of the reasons deregulation happened—we overspent, and so on.

I don’t have any problem with having exactly the amount of reliability that’s suitable for what you need. What’s the point of having perfect reliability on a holiday island? I always tell the story about a Greek holiday island: what’s the worst thing that happens if the electricity goes out there? You’ve got to drink the beer because it’ll get warm, and eat the ice cream before it melts. That’s it—end of story.

But if you’re on an island like ours and you have an Intel fabrication plant, maybe you should have a highly reliable power system. I think reliability is an issue because some systems are probably too reliable, more than they actually need to be.

[MB]: One of our side conversations, as we were interacting before this discussion, was about long-range considerations, which we agreed was a longer-term issue. Specifically, we discussed what happens if there’s no wind or sun over Northern Europe for a couple of weeks. On that point, I expressed my opinion, and you had your interesting perspective. I don’t want to digress into it now, but one of the obvious levers is to say, “Okay, all heavy industry—every 10 to 50 years, you take two weeks off.” That would show up in reliability statistics, but it’s clearly an obvious measure that will be part of the toolkit as we move forward.

[MO]: Absolutely—I definitely advocate for that. I think that’s for sure, because it’s really the only practical way back to our storage issue. If you look at hydrogen or something similar, it’s incredibly expensive. I don’t see hydrogen as a big part of the future. Well, hydrogen will be part of the future—how big, I don’t know—but I don’t think it’s as big as people think.

If you look at hydrogen for the purpose you’re describing, it’s far more expensive compared to creating flexible industry. I think the important thing here is flexible supply chains. Industry is so interconnected that you have to consider the entire supply chain, and you need to make the supply chain itself flexible.

For example, that might mean stockpiling certain products at specific points in the supply chain. Then, even if factories have to shut down for two weeks or even a month, it doesn’t impact the customer, because there’s a stockpile of key products at strategic locations. I definitely think that’s worth looking into, and in fact, I believe it’s substantially cheaper than some of the alternatives.

[MB]: You know, I’ll just compare and contrast—we’ll bring China in again. I was listening recently to a commodities discussion about the export of, I think it was LPG, from the United States to the global market. And what they’ve done in China is they’ve just said, “Okay, well, the price point is fluctuating quite a bit, so we’re going to arbitrage and make our system resilient by having large reserves. We’ll buy and fill the reserves when the commodity is cheap, and we’ll draw from the reserves when the commodity is expensive.”

So there are ways to build resilience into the system. But getting back to the consortium and its research agenda—so the methodologies are solved.

[MO]: Methodologies exist in some aspects, but in others, we don’t even know what they are yet—they’re just a glint in our eye. However, for certain areas, particularly in planning, I think the methodologies largely exist. The real issue is that the data isn’t there yet, and implementing these methodologies takes time. You can’t just roll them out immediately.

That’s the fundamental problem we face. Historically, research would be conducted first and then gradually rolled into industry. But that timeline has become shorter and shorter. Now, in many cases, deployment is happening even before the research is fully completed.

Take resource adequacy as an example: people have deployed significant amounts of wind and solar without fully understanding them from a resource adequacy perspective. Now they’re trying to figure it out, but it’s a bit late, since the resources have already been deployed.

So, methodologies in some areas are already established, but implementation takes time—time we don’t really have. Meanwhile, in other areas, methodologies are only just starting to be thought about; we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Sorry—go on, you had another point. You wanted to know where else we’ve made some progress?

[MB]: And so, on some aspects of IBRs—and it sounds from this discussion, and from Ike’s and another paper I reviewed and was looking through—it’s clear that inverter-based resources, how to manage them, and how to figure out all that stuff, is a core subject of current discussion.

But some aspects are already solved. For example, we know how to make a grid-forming and a grid-following inverter.

[MO]: I mean that—oh, sorry. Yeah, absolutely. There’s been a lot of progress made. There are plenty of converters out there, and HVDC as a technology is an amazing success. It works fundamentally—I think we should be very clear about that. Fundamentally, these technologies are incredible; they’re deployed and functioning well.

The problem we have, though, is we’ve never deployed them at the same scale or made them work together. We’re running into system issues now—that’s the real challenge. The technologies themselves are fine—in fact, they’re incredibly good. It’s amazing. You had John Fitzgerald on recently when you were talking about Eddie O’Connor—look at what those guys are trying to do. It’s amazing, and I think they’ll get there. That technology is definitely moving ahead.

However, the issue is that someone can develop a technology in a lab or factory and push the gizmo out the door, but to understand how it interacts with everything else, there’s no testbed except the actual power system. That’s the core problem. To see what happens, you must deploy it directly into the system. There’s no toy or second system for testing. Unlike a prototype building, there’s only one power system per country. You can’t simply test it in the lab—you must integrate it and observe what actually happens.

Now, we do have very good models, let’s be clear about that. But what we need is better models. If we had improved models, we could confidently simulate deployment beforehand and predict exactly how these technologies would behave in reality. That would help enormously. People talk about digital twins—I’m not entirely sure what a digital twin is, maybe just a very big model—but we certainly need better models, really robust models. Unfortunately, they’re very difficult to build, and there’s little incentive to do so.

If someone develops a new power system analysis tool, how many potential customers are there? Probably fewer than a hundred. Why would anyone invest huge amounts of money developing a tool with such limited commercial appeal? They’d much rather build a video game with a market of billions. This commercial reality is one of the challenges: it’s essentially a commons problem.

I’ll give out a bit here—I might as well. I think the system operators have been left in a very bad position by governments. I blame governments because they don’t understand these issues, even though it’s their responsibility. They should have sought proper advice, asking, “What does this mean for the future? What should we be doing now?” But, of course, they were short-term-focused, didn’t want to know, and when they were told, they didn’t believe it. So now we’re in a critical situation without enough qualified people. It’s a huge issue.

But look, there has been progress made in research and system operations. Certainly, in the services side where I work, many system operators have deployed new services. I’m not saying there’s nothing wrong with them—they’ve deployed them without rigorous methodologies—but they’re working. Most of the practical progress has come from deployment, even as we’re still doing analysis in other areas.

Then there’s DER, distributed energy resources. That’s another area that’s had significant recent attention, and we still have a lot of work to do there. How do we deal with all these small resources aggregated together? Actually, right after this call, I have another call on DER with colleagues—one from Poland and one from the UK. DER is a major issue we must address.

Again, governments provided subsidies, people put solar panels on their roofs, and suddenly we realized we couldn’t see or control them, which became a problem. In various countries, we’ve probably installed too much in certain places. But now it’s out there, people have it on their roofs, and we must start addressing it.

There’s another issue here as well: a small amount of DER isn’t significant, but a large amount creates problems. The key question is when to introduce regulations to ensure proper integration. If you do it right from the start, people ask, “Why are you regulating this? There’s no need,” and they’re right at first. But while one installation doesn’t matter, a hundred of them definitely do. When should you implement the regulation that says, “You cannot connect unless you meet X, Y, and Z”? Do you introduce it at the very beginning, even if people say it’s unnecessary, or do you wait until the problem arises? It’s essentially a first-come, first-served issue—and it’s a real challenge.

[MB]: I’ll give you an example. For years China has required that all wind and solar farms have two to four hours of storage. And four years ago that was unnecessary.

[MO]: Yeah, I remember I was in China at the time.

[MB]: It’s prescient because now it’s absolutely necessary in terms of being well behaved members across transmission grids and stuff like that.

[MO]: I could argue with you over that, but let’s not.

[MB]: We’re coming down to the broad strokes. There are roughly fifty big questions the consortium is focused on—questions like: if we have significantly more renewables, how do we keep the grid reliable, stable, and operational? How do we manage it? How do we form the grid versus follow the grid? At what percentage, and how do we control or even simulate that?

A lot of progress has already been made, but there’s still more work to do. How is the consortium looking to advance that work? The consortium is changing right now, so what is it becoming, and how are you advancing those research questions?

[MO]: I alluded to it earlier. I think the consortium may actually become a legal entity and that I won’t go into the why for that, but there is reasons for it because at the moment it’s a club of people and there’s no legal. So that means that legal entity can hold some resource and money which I think will help in the future because I think that’s one of the quite. Hey, to answer the question with sort of bureaucratic answer. One of the things we lack is a central resource to help administer things and organize things. This is, you know, this is, you know, it’s relying on people like me and Charlie and other people to do the administration at the middle of it. And that’s just a very big waste of our time.

So I think we need an administrative sort of support at the center, which we do have, but it’s not large enough because again, but I blame the governments. I mean, this is a problem with the commons. We’re trying to sort of on behalf of the world, we’re trying to coordinate things because remember, GPST’s job in life is to put itself out of business because if everything has been taken care of, we’re not needed, we’re only needed to make sure it’s taken care of and to fill the gaps. And the GPST as an entity, a lot of the work that’s going on is not. There’s some people who are close in at the GPST and some people are not. There’s a lot of good work going out there for people who we don’t even know, but we just need to know it’s been.

So we do need money, our resource, to make it a sort of a central sort of structure around it to help us help it work. In terms of other research, I mean, the GPST is bigger than research as well. I think I should mention that the research questions were sort of the core of it to start with. But then there’s other pillars, so to speak there. We need to get this information out to the rest of the world. We need to have the standards. We mentioned that a bit earlier with grid following, grid forming because a lot of standard work be done on that stuff. There’s a modeling one about sort of open source tools, etc. And then it’s one about education. So there’s other pillars, but I’ll go back to the research one.

In the research one, most of the research money that is in the GPSD is in organizations that are part of GPSD who work on these questions. But there’s other people in the world working on those questions who are not, you know, formally associated with the gpsd. But that’s fine, they’re doing good work and we don’t need them to. We don’t need or want, you know, we’re not saying you have to be part of us, we’re saying they’re doing it. So what, you know, so for example, some of these research questions, some of the people are working on them and they’re just working to do great work. We’re just going to stay away and let them do it. But in terms of resources, I think the Implementation Councils need resources because that’s where the.

If you think about it, that’s where the real bottleneck is in a lot of these things. Implementation takes a lot of resource. You can’t. Some of this research is very difficult to do that needs resource too. But I definitely think the Implementation Councils need them because they need to actually try. At the end of the day, you can do all the research you want in the world, but until you deploy it in the field, have a look at it, make sure everyone’s confident with it, they’re not going to actually, you know, you don’t fly the airplane to the assurance it’ll stay up. That’s a very time consuming, very expensive exercise. So the Implementation Councils are probably need a huge amount of resource to deploy this stuff.

And the advantage we get out of it is it’s not that it won’t happen, but it’ll happen faster. And if people want to decarbonize, you’re going to have to make it happen faster. I think the only. The GPST is there to make things happen faster. It’ll all happen, but the pace at which it happens will be much slower if we don’t do this coordination.

[MB]: But let’s talk about those resources, just to quantify them, because I understand it’s not billions, it’s a small handful of tens of millions. That’s kind of the requirement.

[MO]: Well, at the very start of the GPST, on a call one day, someone was discussing this number, and someone mentioned 20 million. I said, “Wow, that’s way too small.” And I just worked in orders of magnitude—that’s all I did. I went one order of magnitude up and said 200 million. Nah—I said 2 billion.

I think the actual number is around 2 billion, and I’ll tell you why. Remember, there are other pillars. Pillar one has been the focal point of our conversation. It’s the one that—unless it works—the rest won’t matter. It’s the core pillar, if you know what I mean. We need to solve these problems before we deploy anything.

But pillar two is about getting every single system operator in the world up to speed on this. That’s a very large task. It’s not necessarily a highly technical task, but it’s a very large task. Pillar two is probably where most of the expense lies. Think about it this way—how many system operators are there in the world? Let’s say around 200 or more.

[MB]: There’s a lot of subnational ones in several jurisdictions.

[MO]: Let’s say there’s a thousand—just to keep a nice round figure. Yeah, let’s say there’s a thousand. Right. Now, if you take one system, the average system operator, and say, “I want to deploy all these new tools and techniques,” you’re going to spend at least 10 million on each one. There you go—that’s 2 billion.

[MB]: The GPST doesn’t need that money themselves. They need that money to be spent by others.

[MO]: Exactly. Sorry—yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. Oh, no, we don’t need the money. We’re definitely not saying we need it; that’s for sure.

On the research side, though, let’s return to that. We have done some numbers—they’re somewhat speculative—but we’ve done the calculations. Our numbers indicate that for the GPST to carry out the research and conduct enough demonstrations (because you really need to demonstrate this stuff out in the field), and to reach the stage where it takes off on its own, the required figure is around 500 million. Most of that, perhaps 80%, is for demonstrations. The research itself might cost about 100 million, while the demonstrations might cost about 400 million.

Then, the additional 1.5 billion I mentioned is for scaling up and disseminating all that information to others. That’s roughly the breakdown.

[MB]: But putting this into context again, the transformation is going to save us far more trillions than it will cost—even though it will indeed cost trillions. This is small money. This is tip-of-the-spear. It’s fundamental to electrifying everything and decarbonizing our electrical generation. This is a high-leverage investment.

My call to action for impact funds, big donors, and foundations is to reach out to Mark and say, “We want to help.” As you’re transitioning out of NREL and shifting from aggregation into an organization, that’s going to require some priming of the pump and then some actual pumping.

[MO]: Now, just to be clear, we do have supporters—I’m not going to mention who they are, but there are lots of them. We do need them, and we do need more of them. There are definitely foundations out there that are very serious about supporting us. I think we need to highlight that, because it’s an important area.

One of the problems with this area—and you mentioned this to me the last time we spoke—is that there are lobby groups out there promoting their own particular story. They’re lobbying from a commercial standpoint, starting with enormous resources. We’re trying to do the commons thing, where there’s no direct profit, and therefore we don’t have as much lobbying power because we’re not doing this for profit. It’s essentially the curse of the commons.

Governments have indeed screwed up, but someone needs to step in and fund this. If they don’t fund it, it won’t happen. And if it doesn’t happen, the transition won’t happen as quickly as you’d like. That’s just the consequence. I hate having to say this, but I’m already looking forward to the moment in ten years when someone tells me, “Oh, but you never told us,” and I’ll have to reply, “Well, we did.”

Because let’s be clear—there’s one thing we haven’t emphasized enough: wind and solar are being curtailed right now because some of these issues aren’t yet solved.

[MB]: Let’s be very clear where you’re sitting. It’s a significant problem.

[MO]: Yeah, we won’t go into the technicalities of it—there’s no point. But the simple fact is that because some of these problems are not solved, wind and solar are being curtailed, and that’s only going to get worse if these problems persist. That means the transition ends up costing way more money.

The old story, I suppose, is that everyone then looks around and asks, “Who’s responsible for this?” And the answer is that everyone passes the buck—except, perhaps, the developers. We’ve gotten a lot of support from developers. I’ve already mentioned system operators, but there are also developers and OEMs.

The developers are very interesting because they know where this is going, and they can see there’s a lot of money on the table. They realize, “We won’t make as much money if this doesn’t work,” so we’re starting to get support from people who have money on the line. But at the end of the day, I think this is something that should be funded by government because it’s a common good, so to speak—even though governments typically don’t fund it.

Wind and solar are definitely being curtailed now, and they will continue to be curtailed if this isn’t sorted out.

[MB]: So we’re at the end of our time, including interruptions. I always like to leave an open-ended opportunity—something we’ve missed, something important to say, or a personal reflection that you think would help people think correctly about anything related to the transition we’re going through.

[MO]: I think the one thing I’d like to say—and I’ve been doing this for many years—is that I’m a professor, and I produce lots of really great people. My reputation is, I think, as good as it is—not so much for what I’ve done, but for the people I’ve produced. I’m known as their PhD advisor, and they’ve done very well, so it reflects positively on me.

We need more of those people. But we don’t need thousands of them; we just need more. This isn’t a volume game; it’s a talent game. We need better people—more of those better people. We don’t need lots of them, but we do need enough. And those people simply aren’t there. They’re just not coming through fast enough.

The way I described it many years ago was that there’s a linear increase in the production of these people, but an exponential need—and we’re never going to catch up. If you talk to any of the system operators in any industry in this area, the one issue they all face is hiring; they all have the same problem.

I don’t want funders out there to go back and say, “He doesn’t need money.” The biggest problem we’ll have, if we do get all the funding, is finding the right people. But give us the money first. At least then we can focus on finding them. But it’s finding the people that’s challenging. This area is incredibly difficult when it comes to finding people who are good at what they do. Like I said, we don’t need a flood of them, but we need more than we have.

[MB]: There is a Western gap—I would say a developer gap—in terms of getting the right STEM-oriented people through, which is affecting much of the transition. But we’re at the top of our time.

I’m Michael Barnard, and this is Redefining Energy Tech. My guest today has been Mark O’Malley, Leverhulme Professor of Power Systems at Imperial College London, a core figure leading the research agenda with the GPST and working at the forefront of accelerating electrification of everything and decarbonizing the grid in a fundamental, tip-of-the-spear sort of way.

Mark, thank you so much for your time today.

[MO]: You’re welcome. Take care. Bye.