Hitachi Energy Leads the Energy Transition

Laura Fleming and Alfredo Parres from Hitachi Energy dive into the critical challenges of integrating renewable energy, particularly offshore wind power, into the UK grid. They explore innovative solutions, including HVDC technology and digital advancements, that are driving efficient, reliable energy distribution and shaping the future of the global energy landscape. With Laura’s over 25 years of experience in the energy sector and Alfredo’s long history in renewables, the two give insights into how Hitachi is making the energy transition possible.

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Allen Hall: With power grids adapting to accommodate growing renewable energy, the challenges of integration had never been more critical. This week, we speak with Alfredo Parres group, senior Vice President and head of Renewables at Hitachi Energy. And Laura Fleming, country managing director at Hitachi Energy UK and Ireland.

Together, they explain how Hitachi’s technology is enabling efficient, reliable connections between massive wind farms and our existing electrical infrastructure. This is a great interview. Stay tuned.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress.

Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Laura and Alfredo, welcome to the podcast.

Laura Flemming: Glad to be here.

Alfredo Parres: Hey, huh.

Allen Hall: How are you? Laura, let’s start with you because I’ve watched a number of your interviews on YouTube and there’s just a lot happening within Hitachi. What are some of the main challenges in the UK facing sort of the renewable energy grid and all of the particularly wind power, which is what we’re focused on.

There’s a lot of wind power offshore being deployed in the UK at the minute. How is a Hitachi trying to handle that and distribute that energy?

Laura Flemming: Yeah. Thank you for the question. And uh, it’s a super exciting time, as you’re saying in in the uk energy space. And maybe just to explain briefly what is going on the UK.

At the moment, it’s very hard at work to decarbonize the electricity grid. It’s actually planning to be fully carbon zero by 2030. That’s only in five years time now. And that’s obviously a very big job. What we’re doing in order to reach that as a country is switching away from from carbon sources.

And so about six weeks ago. We switched off our last coal-fired power station, for example. But of course we still need energy and we still need a lot of electricity. So what we’re doing instead is building out a lot of renewable energy predominantly offshore wind because that allows us to produce vast amounts of electricity quickly cheaply and sustainably.

The result of all of that is that actually we’re producing electricity in very different places than that we used to. So offshore wind, obviously produced in the sea, mainly in the north of Scotland particularly in Scotland. But the demand centers are all in the s of the country, predominantly around London and Birmingham areas.

So we needing to transport this electricity around the system in a very different way. And all of that is triggering lots of grid reinforcements requiring to be done as well. So, and obviously without that grid, we can’t move around this this new electricity from the generation source to the to the demand centers in a very efficient and also in a reliable way.

And also making sure that we don’t have too many losses on the system. So this is a huge task. The role that Hitachi energy in is playing in all of this is to ensure that a large number of these offshore wind projects can be connected to the UK grid. We are also supporting the transmission owners to help build out the grid, to make it more flexible, more reliable, and more efficient.

And then we’re also supporting, for example, onshore and solar generators connecting their projects in via, via substations, et cetera.

Allen Hall: Alfredo, what happens if the, this interconnection doesn’t happen to the UK economy and more? Wider impacts in terms of Europe. It does seem Laura has mentioned a lot of the energy sources are coming from remote places, but the power is being used in kind of the big places.

Paris, London in Germany, there’s just big power usage areas. If we don’t connect them, what’s the outcome of that?

Alfredo Parres: Yeah. I think it’s fair to say that it’s difficult to think about an energy transition without grids. Grids, electricity is about to be everything as we move on. And we need a lot of those.

And grids that’s in many places are also oldish. Depending where you are on the world can have assets where that are pretty old. So we need to pay attention to that. The good news on this, a Noel, as I like to say, is that I see that. The conversation on grid has evolved drastically, compared to a to previous years.

I see the conversation as has already evolved a lot, typically in my early days in, in this business it’s a few years. We had to educate people, educate governments on the importance of grids, anticipating what was coming, or it was a lot of education to be done. These days, you go to any conference, any civil servant speaks about grids as well as I do.

So that means they, they are aware, they’ve educated themselves, they know what they’re talking about. And they the connections, I think in Europe, if you think about the grid action plan that the commission has put together is looking at implementing. I think that speaks what I’m mentioning here, the plans are there and the options to do things are huge.

From increasing capacity or improving the usage of the existing grids. That’s the first step we can do. Technologies are there to do that, building new grids and planning the development of new grids. There are things that are doing, so in a nutshell, Alan, and we can go in further details in the conversation, there is no energy transition without greats good news or politicians or governments.

Got it. We start putting the real

Joel Saxum: actions required, I think to speak on this problem here with grids and integration with renewables. Again, for the energy transitions. Someone once said there’ll be no transition without transmission. I like that statement. But to speak on that issue more when these, when the grid that we’re, that we’ve lived with for, a long time it was originally developed. Most of that was with this consistent power delivery to it, right? It was coal fired power plants and other sources where it was consistent. And now when we add renewables to the mix, and they are by nature, intermittent, whether it’s solar or wind or however and people are trying to control that now as we move forward with battery storage and things.

It complicates that grid question as well because now we’re saying, Hey, we need to upgrade the grid, but we also need to upgrade and future proof the grid, and I think that’s a very important statement there as well. And Hitachi, that’s what you guys are doing. You’ve got loads of people working on these problems to solve this intermittent delivery issues.

And that’s hand in hand with the contemporary term, I guess is the smart grid. So Alfredo, I’d like to ask you this question. At what point in time did you start to see, the stakeholders that can make some of these decisions around the grid start to open their eyes to the difference that we need to future proof this?

The energy mix looks different, and if we don’t fix this, we’re gonna really run into issues

Alfredo Parres: beside grids. We are spending a lot of time to tell exactly about that. It’s not just the grid, it’s the complexity of the power system we are developing. We are going to manage intermittent source of generation.

Different side of science type of generation based on power electronics, which basically says it’s a generation profile that is much more volatile with less inertia. We will have to manage all those elements in a harmonious way because we want to keep a sustainable power system at power safe and save power system.

So the education is happening and we see the message getting there. As I said, you think from a planning perspective and everything start with planning. There’s no point to try to solve it if you don’t have a visibility 5, 10, 15, 20 years ahead to see what are we going to need? What are the investments we going to need?

What is infras going to need? And that is happening. We still, of course, need to always to improve, and that’s what we’re talking right now with the authorities, know how we can improve the planning piece on the technology side, we tell them technology exists to manage this complexity we’re going to face.

Intermittency is not the end of the world. It should not stop penetration of renewables. We can bring much more into the system and technologies are there to help us for electronics. These things we use for batteries management to use fax, all those system, I have to stabilize grids to be the HVDC connections.

Essential to keep the stability, to keep this flow of energy oriented in different directions. Digital, absolutely key. Also because digital will help us to manage this complexity we’re facing. From a demand perspective, from a generation perspective, to operate, to maintain, the digital piece absolutely key.

And that’s a not so easy story to get through because digital, not everybody understand what it means. For real. We are Hitachi, we make it as a party for us, no to tell how digital is real and can help us to to address our challenges. No.

Allen Hall: Laura, I want to use the Eastern GreenLake two as our test case here to walk through some of the things Hitachi is doing.

So the Eastern GreenLake two is A-H-V-D-C project, two gigawatts that is being transmitted from Northern Scotland down to England offshore, and the this distance is 440 kilometers, which in America terms is about 250 plus miles. That’s a long way for an HVE DC cable. The complexities of that project have to be enormous.

How does Hitachi fit into that infrastructure project?

Laura Flemming: Yeah, it’s a really good question. And the exactly as you say, the Eastern Greenland project is a is massive in terms of scale. But it’s also groundbreaking in terms of what it’s trying to do. It it will be collecting the power from a number of offshore wind farms and renewable generation capacity from the north of Scotland collected at this this, really large substation that’s going to be built in in the north of Scotland, as you say.

And then to be transporting that power to the somewhere in the middle of England. Via an offshore connection. So rather than transporting that power via, multiple pylons and multiple cables that going onshore overground as we would’ve done in the maybe in the good old days.

All of this power is being transported offshore. And that has a number, a number of advantages. In terms of connection with the communities in terms of environmental impact in terms of, being able to cross communities, et cetera. But it also has an added benefit because actually using A three DC over a large distance also means that, the energy losses will be significantly reduced.

So what is it that Hitachi Energy is doing? We’re providing both the on and offshore substations that’s basically can, making the connection. So we don’t do the cables, but we do, we effectively provide the plug, right? That allows this energy to be collected and to be put into the cables.

And then to be taken out of the cables and then put into the grid so it can actually be usefully used. And what that’s actually allowing, the UK electricity system operator to do is manage the power flows around the country. So really providing that security and that stabilization delivering power as and when they need it but also as and when it is being produced and really optimizing.

What we’re producing as a country. And as you say, also that helps us manage the the renewable resource, which is sometimes, is it is intermittent. So there’s a lot more work around digitalization power electronics going on in the background to to manage those flows. At any given time of the day, we can still keep the lights on.

Allen Hall: I want to dig into that a little bit because we use HV dc you just throw on that term. It’s we just use HVDC, but that is really complicated. The power electronics that are going into these devices are revolutionary. To do something at a high voltage DC wise in the electronics to make that happen are truly incredible.

And to do it bidirectionally, you can move power around as needed because of the renewable energy factor where sometimes as the wind’s not blowing, sometimes it’s not as sunny out. You need to redirect where energy is flowing. H Feed DC gives you that. But how much infrastructure on the Hitachi side is.

Dedicated to HVDC and the software and all the control systems to create this grid.

Alfredo Parres: So we just celebrated 75 years of anniversary for the technology. We started back in the early fifties. So that tells is a young, old technology we are talking about here, the last version or the last technology we’re using.

The VSC variable source converter version of it is a bit younger. No, but this is a technology that has been proving by the years benefits. No you mentioned it, long distance transmission, bidirectional flow, but there are a lot of orders benefits, no, not the least, the low losses. No.

We use it because we reduce drastically the losses of our lung transmission. Plus the support we can give to the grid to which the HBC link is connected. So actually this link is supporting the stability of the grid. And in these days with the high penetration renewables, that’s extremely important just to tell.

The benefits are absolutely phenomenal. And it’s true that with the emergence and the boom on around offshore wind, the technologies is facing fantastic times. And for us it’s really where we are putting a lot of our investments, a lot of our people we’re talking about, of thousands of people are being hired to support this business.

Among the six billions we are investing these days, a lot is going in manufacturing of new valve new valve manufacturings, hiring new engineers to go in all different centers. And in Sweden, ru where we have, the capital, the place where the technology was born. Are we talking about the middle of Sweden in a very nice natural place, but not necessarily the place you would go for to in business, having hundreds of people going there, finding the, finding themselves comfortable with a clean mission, which is to accelerate this energy, trans transition and working with, for leading company, they got education.

They work in a diverse environment because of course we got people coming from all over the world. They find themselves and they can law. So really I think HVDC is leaving extraordinary times. We see that all suppliers knowing this technology investing. So we are not the only ones, which is good also because that’s, the demand is huge.

We need. Everybody to contribute, and we need then society to understand the benefits now of the technology.

Joel Saxum: So HVDC in my mind, I think would it’s going to be as the grid gets newer, fresher, more innovative, and we start putting some money into it. You’re starting to see some of that here in the states.

Couple saw a couple of reports in the last week of some big money rolling into it. HVDC to me should start to be a much broader part of that energy grid as you guys are focusing a lot of effort into it with employees and investment. How mu, how much of a percentage growth do you think, and I know that’s a pointed question, do you see an HVDC versus in the past?

Laura Flemming: If I can maybe comment on in terms of the growth that we see in the uk, we’re seeing the UK really moving for maybe doing. One HVDC project that, as a country, right? Not necessarily as Hitachi Energy by themselves, but as a country we’re really moving from doing one of these projects a year to doing, multiple, like three or four, maybe even more projects a year.

So the growth is, not just huge, it’s exponential. And as Alfredo was saying earlier, that’s really why we’re, we’re resourcing up, we’re hiring, thousands of people. To be able to work on HVDC solutions around the world. And because it’s not just the manufacturing of the converters and all of the other equipments that goes onto the, into the platforms and into the substations.

There’s a huge amount of engineering, of front end engineering that and design that needs to be done. Before you can start building such a project and really planning all of that in, in a strategic way into the overall grid is really crucial. And I think this is really the interesting thing that we’re seeing in the UK where we’ve really, moved from a connect and manage sort of approach.

So we’ll connect it when there is a need for it, and we know we have everything ready. To, know, let’s actually plan for, let’s plan for the future and we’re going to see what we need in the future, and we’re going to get ready and build that because we know that the generation and the demand will be coming.

And that’s when solutions such as HVDC become really critical. And it also depends on distance, right? So the distance is really a big element in HVDC. So anything. Over 120, 30 miles away. Is really going to be beneficial to use HVDC

Allen Hall: and Hitachi touches. Almost everyone’s lives in Europe and the United States.

You may not realize that, but Hitachi’s big on H-V-A-C-H-V-D-C and on the monitoring and support side they’re involved everywhere. And maybe touch upon Alfredo what. Hitachi is doing after the sale, after the grid’s been installed. There’s a lot of monitoring, support and software that goes on after the grid has been connected, right?

Absolutely.

Alfredo Parres: And welcome to, to, to this new world know, and I mentioned it before, know, which is digital, I mean with our new owners, as I guess more many people know by, by now. As a former a PB now owned by Hitachi. We have new owners that believe deeply in, in the role of digital and they invest heavily as a business itself.

And we are enjoying the benefits of being part of this larger corporation and developing the, those solutions of the future based on the core knowledge we do have. ’cause at the end, what makes a difference in digital is the understanding of the product and the process and the technology, which we master in Hitachi.

And you put a layer of digital on top of that. Which is the embedded digital solution we have in product solutions plus the layers of digital. You have to control and operate all those assets. Bingo. Then you start having comprehensive solutions that bring value to customers. No, and that’s where we are heading for the train has left the station ready for a while now.

We are not so starting now but the journey is still long to go until we reach full benefits. And Forest Service is going to be a huge focus area because we are sitting not only on a huge install base, you think about what a hundred years working on, on, on the market with millions of equipments out there that we can serve and we to serve more of them, but the requirements really come higher as the system will become more complex, more fragile.

So we need to be able to react quickly. But also we have to react to the environment, conditions that we are facing. Going to tell about all the climate incidents that we’re facing. That’s part also of operating an asset. No. And here too, a digital play, a big role or to not only anticipate forecasting evidence that can happen.

Get prepared with your plans. Get prepared with your actions to add quickly. Definitely for us is a critical area.

Allen Hall: Can we discuss the order book for Hitachi at a top level A little bit? How busy is Hitachi right now on orders and my guess is that your phone is ringing all the time. People trying to get orders in for HVDC, even HVAC at the minute.

How busy are you?

Laura Flemming: Yeah, now I can comment from a UK and Ireland perspective, so no, we’re very busy. And obviously that is wonderful. What’s really important for us is to ensure how do we bring the best of what Hitachi energy has got offer to our customers?

And therefore we have changed slightly the approach in which we are working with customers really working in programs. And frameworks and again, in in a systematic and strategic way. And that is a number of benefits. Yes, it allows us to understand, what work is coming. And that is really important for us, for our production planning, for making the investments that we talked about earlier.

And also for hiring people because the biggest. Obstacle that we have in in this energy transition is actually people we need. We need to train, we need to hire, we need to manage a vast amount of new people coming into the industry, not just in Hitachi energy, but into the industry.

So we’re really facing facing quite an uphill battle there. And so yeah, having that visibility requires us to, and allows us to plan in advance, there’s another very important aspect to all of this as well is that when we know what our customers are looking to do over the next few years or so, we can start working and engaging with them at a much earlier stage in their project.

That will allow us to help them standardize some of the solutions and that standardization will allow us to speed up, it’ll allow us to work more safely. It will allow us to, move from site to site knowing the issues that can appear on sites and actually be able to anticipate on the, on those in advance.

So yeah, that early engagement and a strategic approach to, to the order book, as you were saying earlier is super critical for us, but also ultimately for the customer and for the overall, for the greater good.

Allen Hall: Let’s talk about that variations that you see on orders and everybody when you hear about the power grid, a lot of operators, owners want a very specific set of parameters.

They don’t want to order a generic piece of equipment, but that’s a huge problem for the grid and for the manufacturing and planning. Are you starting to see a little more standardization as. The demand goes up that maybe I can use a slightly better HVD system that’s standardized for my project instead of having a tailored one for my specific needs.

Alfredo Parres: I think it’s a moving reality. And, and we cannot say we are there. Of course, we cannot say we are there, but we mentioned this always on the different ways. No, now I refer to the first one. Or if you have a frame agreement, if you work on a portfolio of project. Here we go.

That’s what we got. That’s what we did with the transmission system operator tenant in Germany where they came out with a large number of HVDC connection, 12 in one shot, and they went to markets. We got half of them, 13 billion contracts, 3 billion US dollar contract with that.

You can imagine with that in, in ahead of us, ahead of you to be delivered the next. Five to six years, there is an opportunity to go project by project, get lessons learned, standardize improve efficiency, and that’s what’s the opportunity we are in front of us and customer get it.

Of course, they’ll still like to specify. And that’s the second message we are giving. No, we talk about standardization. We should not think about having equipment out of the shelf. No, I don’t think we get there, and we should be dreaming of that. It’s more strategizing the requirements and then the manufacturers will put all their innovation, their creativity, to make those equipment as standard, as reputable as possible.

We had to start with the requirements. No, as you said, the transmission system operators, the utility companies, if they could standardize their requirements as much as possible, that will help the supply chain big time. Not only Hitachi energy, the whole supply chain.

Allen Hall: Yeah. If we wanna build the grid quickly, we need to have some level of standardization.

The number of varieties of transformers that exist in the world is in the thousands. The tens of thousands at the moment, which is a little crazy because we’re just moving power from A to B. We can have some standardization. I and Hitachi being a huge company worldwide, global company, country to country, that changes also.

So you’re getting to different types of requirements in different countries. If we’re going to go fast, we have to standardize at least a little bit and have maybe have a little more flexibility, which I think is afraid of what your point is. Come in with a spec sheet, but have a little bit of movement in it so we can deliver you the products faster.

Because the grid buildout is important right now, right? We say we need to

Alfredo Parres: go at speed and scale. That’s the name of the game, and that’s standardization. It’s innovation technology, but also innovation business models.

Laura Flemming: Standardization doesn’t mean, it is off the shelf and it’s, I am, 100% identical.

So much time is being used up because every time you start with a blank sheet and start, designing and engineering from the ground up, what if we could start at 70 or 80% and then, specify and and personalize that last 20. That saves saves so much time, but also removes the the the room for error redesign, et cetera, et cetera.

And as of, as Alfredo was saying, that’s really gonna speed us up

Joel Saxum: and I want to touch on that too, because of. Big part of what you guys do, and Alan had said this earlier, even if you don’t really realize it, Hitachi is touching your life somewhere, right When you flip the lights on at some point in time, Laura and Alfredo had something to do with that.

But what I wanna say is that with all of the innovation and the work that you guys are doing, and we’re talking about kind of economies of scale and standardization and getting things done more efficiently. What kind of impact do you think that Hitachi’s work has on the public perception of renewables?

Alfredo Parres: First of all, I want to say we like to be humbled also. We are a large corporation. We do a lot of things. We are a successful company, but we are only one part of the whole value chain. And it’s true that the big weight is carried by the investors or the ones who have to build the projects.

The trust the utility companies will have to build those lines. So our contribution to that is, is very much in providing the education, explaining what we do, explaining the benefits of the technologies, or sometimes also to make sure we don’t get misleaded in some wrong concepts, nor what could be the impact on people of high voltage transmission lines to say something, so we can tell things in a simple way.

We like to do it, but we are only what we are. No, we are a technology companies. And we have to support all of us, those who are taking the major risk to to define, to provide investments to to talk to to, to people, to talk to civil servants, to talk to local populations, to say what’s, what are the benefits of those technologies?

Laura Flemming: I think what Hitachi Energy is doing is, really showing also how all of the different pieces, come together. A lot of our technology and equipment, it’s usually a little bit hidden, right? The in terms of renewable energy, the attention goes to the the, the lovely shiny turbines and the things, and the things that we see.

But they are also usually the ones that attract, a lot of the negative attention. And I think by showing how renewable energy. Can be integrated into the grid successfully. How we make sure that where the turbines are turning, that we don’t throw any of that energy away. Because we’re now optimizing, we can be more flexible and actually we can provide energy security because, at the end of the day, this has been one of the big drivers.

Particularly so since we saw the impacts after, COVID and in Europe, particularly the the war in Ukraine, how easily, we can really be caught on the back foot in, in terms of our energy supply. So providing that energy security is absolutely critical because, let’s be honest, as we go on and on as a country and as a population, we’ll be needing more energy as we go forward.

So bringing the public along is super important. I don’t think as an industry we’re doing enough yet. But I’m really pleased that since the summer, IT energy is now actually one of the key five key requirements and action plans in the UK in terms of what the government is driving forward.

So having that specific focus. On energy, the same as education, the same as health is is a massive game changer. And I think what that oil will also do is make a lot more people interested to come and work in the energy industry going forward, which is exactly what we need.

Allen Hall: So what does the energy future look like with Hitachi?

What should we be looking for in the next year or two?

Laura Flemming: I think we’ll be building a lot of projects. I will be, think we’ll be supporting a lot of customers. And I also think you’ll be seeing a lot of innovation in terms of how we speed up, how we do things more quickly and flexibly. But also how the grid is actually going to look like, once we’re actually building up to the capacity that we need.

How is digitization really going to help us, accurately create the flows through the electricity system? And making sure that at any given time, the lights will stay on.

Allen Hall: Lauren Alfredo, this has been a terrific discussion. I’ve learned a tremendous amount. I think the world needs to know more about Hitachi energy and what you’re doing to make the grid more reliable.

I. And larger. And Laura, how do people get ahold of Hitachi Energy? How do they find out more about the great things that Hitachi is doing?

Laura Flemming: Thank you very much. It was indeed a very interesting conversation. So thank you for inviting us. And for anyone who would like to find out more about Hitachi Energy please follow us.

Via the usual channels or find us on Hitachi energy.com.

Allen Hall: Laura and Alfredo, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Really enjoy speaking with you today.

Laura Flemming: Thank you. Thank you.