246. From Excel Sheets to AI: the new way for Corporates to procure and report Energy - Sep26

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

With Laurent Segalen from London and Gerard Reid from Berlin, this is Redefining Energy.

Laurent Segalen (0:10)

Today on Redefining Energy, Gerard, we're going to talk about the future of procuring and reporting clean energy.

Gerard Reid (0:19)

Yeah, that's one of your pet hates, isn't it?

Laurent Segalen (0:22)

We have been at it for decades. This episode is part of a series of three that we're going to do on European start-ups. Well, the third one is a bit more than a start-up. And see how digital is really changing the way energy is procured, managed, traded. Yeah, it changes totally. And of course, you need new actors, because in Cubans, a bit of difficulty to adopt new technologies.

Gerard Reid (0:51)

You're totally right. Listen, at the end of the day, in the increasing complex world that we're in, you have to stop using Excel sheets.

Just to put it, if you can imagine, you're a company, that's a big international company, and let's assume you're in 300 countries across the world. That means you're buying energy in these 300 countries, just as a very simple example. And trying to take all that information together and make sense of it, and make proper decisions, that's bloody tough. And as I said, it's getting more and more complex.

Laurent Segalen (1:23)

Yeah, and even if it's not very fashionable right now, you still have to report your emissions.

And of course, there's been a lot of pledges of net zero and so on. Some are ignored, some are dodged. That's why we decided to bring on Carolyn Addy. She is commercial manager at the London-based Platron Cool. Renewable, excellent name, without the E at the end.

Gerard Reid (1:46)

So what is Renewabl, Laurent?

Laurent Segalen (1:48)

It's a company I know the CEO very well. So what they are doing is basically they are providing an AI power platform that directly plug into your system, analyze your energy consumption, analyze your emissions, and help the tracking and then the reporting, whether it's internal or external, of basically your whole energy complex.

And they also manage to track all the certificates and of course how real they are, and then reallocate the certificates so you have not only a shape profile in terms of energy, but also a shape profile in terms of emissions. So that's really the direction of the journey, but our guest is certainly gonna talk a bit more about all those topics.

Gerard Reid (2:33)

So let's bring Carolyn on the show then.

Laurent Segalen (2:36)

Carolyn, welcome to the show.

Carolyn Addy (2:38)

Thank you for having me.

Gerard Reid (2:39)

Carolyn, it's great having you for a start, and look, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. And maybe I just kick off by just sort of asking a little bit about the state of the market for energy procurement. What's going on there and what are the trends you're seeing?

Carolyn Addy (2:54)

If we think about from a corporate energy buyer's perspective, one of the big trends we see is a significant amount of time spent managing the admin and the data flows and a real will to move to diminishing that time and much more on a higher level strategic decision-making in what is an increasingly complex procurement and regulatory market. Buyers are looking for better tools to enable decision-making.

Gerard Reid (3:29)

At the time, it was very interesting the way you answered that question, because you didn't talk about energy procurement, you talked about all the administration that they're focused on. Maybe explain what that administration burden is, because they're going, are you just buying energy? It's not too difficult, is it not?

Carolyn Addy (3:46)

So if we think about large corporates, thousands of sites, data spread across countries, multiple scope to leavers, so PPAs, unbundled EACs, potentially some on-site generation, green tariffs, collating all of that data, and there's a mix of access to that data, whether you can get access to your consumption data, whether you can get your contract data all in one place, you need all of that collated in order to have the correct foundation to make your longer term procurement decisions. And potentially where you have a relatively simple portfolio and maybe a single solution, maybe it's easier, but for large complex portfolios and multiple market leavers, it becomes increasingly complex to manage that. And also have visibility of how those solutions are performing.

That's from the procurement side. That then also flows through to sustainability teams who are using that same data to do their internal sustainability reporting or all the different frameworks they're reporting to.

Laurent Segalen (4:56)

So you introduce Scope 2, Scope 2, which is like for people who don't know, Scope 2 are the emissions embedded in the electricity you buy.