Hi, welcome to this week's episode of the Top Floor CO podcast and I'll be joined by Steven Croeser of Reenergized. Steven's had a really exciting journey and basically he's got a unique solution under the energy storage space that is better than fossil fuels and really will really help save the planet. So I'm going to introduce you to Steven who's going to take you through his journey and exactly how this solution is going to be groundbreaking in this particular area. So Steven, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. So if you can just take us through the journey that got you to the point of where you are now of basically co-founding Reenergized. Yeah, sure. So as I was introduced, I'm Steven Croeser and I'm the CEO at Reenergized and co-founded it with Graham Cook, who's our CFO, and Thomas Petani, who's our CTO. So he's in charge of the team, which does the really smart and intelligent stuff. And we have an absolutely fantastic team, so of a variety of engineers. So but first of all, I'd like to tell you about the journey and what we're seeking to do really. So we all know that the world is being damaged by the effects of fossil fuel generation that we, you know, excess amounts of CO2 entering the atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change. So everyone knows that there's a solution to that in the form of renewable energy. You can build out renewable energy and you can create green electricity from that. And you can also decarbonize other sectors through green electricity, such as electric vehicles or electric heating of houses, et cetera, et cetera. But the problem you have is that renewable energy is intermittent. So you need a solution for the intermittency. So sun shines several hours a day, but it doesn't shine at night. And the wind blows more during the winter and less during the summer. So you need a solution to how do you manage this variable energy. And also demand is variable as well. You get more demand during the day. And then even more, you get an evening peak and a morning peak as well, but then much less at night. So how do you manage this variability of demand and supply? And the solution for that is energy storage and particularly longer duration energy storage, which is where high density hydro come in. So what we're really is a solution for is we help facilitate more and more renewable energy by sitting in between the generation from wind and solar principally and the customer doing what they want to do and doing what they all want to do. So we sit in the middle and we're solution for balancing the two in real time. And so our solution, it's a longer duration form of energy storage. And why do we come about this energy storage? So going back a few years, myself and colleagues, we were at various energy conferences, and everyone was talking about renewable energy and the need for the energy transition and to retire fossil fuels. And then everyone was saying, and the solution to this is energy storage and the solution to energy storage is lithium-ion batteries. And no one was talking about anything else in this market. But we knew at the time that most of the world's energy storage was done by traditional pumped hydro. So traditional pumped hydro is where you've got a lake at the bottom of the mountain and another lake behind a dam at the top of a mountain. And when energy is cheap and abundant, you pump the water up the mountain. And when there's less energy available, you release it and regenerate electricity through a turbine. It's a solution that's been around for about 100 years. In the UK, it was built to balance when we had base load coal and base load nuclear, where you actually had more generation than you needed overnight. And so you stored it overnight and then you released it during the day when there was more demand. So we have it at five sites in the UK. The last one was built in the 1980s. And that was to solve a specific energy problem with them. But the energy problem we have today is different, because it's all to do with renewables. And there's increased volatility, which rates increased variability in prices, which is difficult for both the system operators to manage, but also difficult for the consumer. Because how do you know what the prices are going to be? So what we were looking for is a solution that sits in the middle. And lithium-ion batteries are a great technology, but they're really a great technology for shorter durations, one, two, three hours for balancing or stabilizing the grid in real time. But then they become a very expensive solution to do longer durations of energy storage. So our solution is based upon this old, mature form of energy storage of pumped hydro. But we call it ourself high density hydro. And if, as everyone knows, that the high definition television and HD television is better than the standard definition television. So high density hydro is better than your traditional pumped hydro. And what we're bringing is scalability to this oldest and most mature form of energy storage. So why we call it high density? So rather than using water, what we're doing, we've introduced a fluid that is two and a half times the density of water. So the advantage of increasing the density of the fluid is two things. You can either reduce the footprint and the size of a project proportional to the increase in density. So that means that our projects are only 40% of the size for the same performance. Or alternatively, you can lower the elevation you need for this type of energy storage. Again, proportional to the increase in density. So this means that we can get the same performance at say 200 meters as you would with water at 500 meters. And we all know when we look out the window, when we're on a train or in our car, there are many, many more hills than there are mountains. So we have a solution that you can put on hills that you can find everywhere, rather than mountains that are only found in certain locations, the Alps and places like that. So what we're bringing is scalability to the oldest and most mature form of energy storage. That sounds amazing, Stephen. So will this save like an energy company like millions? And so what it does is ultimately it will save the consumer money because renewable energy is now lower cost than generating energy from gas or coal or certainly nuclear. So renewable energy is already a lower cost form of generation. But the problem with that is it's intermittency. So you get low prices and you get high prices, you don't always have enough renewable energy. So you've got to back it up with other forms like gas to create that energy. What we're doing is effectively replacing that backup gas or the backup coal so you can have more and more renewable energy, which is lower cost. And then we help to stabilize the grid, which stabilizes prices, which ultimately feeds through to lower cost to the consumer. So what we're really trying to do is you decarbonize the power grid in the UK, but then in other countries across the world, we have a solution that is applicable. Not only in wet places, in the places where you get traditional pump hydro, because you need lots of water, but also in places where which are very arid or risk of desert, risk of becoming deserts, such as the Middle East or southern United States, parts of Australia. We have a great solution because we don't rely on water in the same way. We manufacture this fluid and then it's in a closed loop system. So once it's in there, we just keep using the same fluid year after year, and we expect our projects to last at least 60 years. So we're creating through infrastructure assets where the construction activity is a one-off event, and then you can just keep using them, bringing benefits to the energy companies and because clearly if they're going to invest in an energy asset, some plant and machinery that they'll look to make some money from it. But because the overall system is more stable and using a lower cost form of electricity as a generation, ultimately it becomes a lower cost solution to the consumer. And the beauty of this is renewable energy will last forever. We're never going to run out of wind and some. Well, we will eventually, I guess, in millions of years in the future, but in anyone's conceivable imaginative sort of future, we're not going to run out of renewable energy. And so once you've built a system like we're talking about, which is based on renewables, energy storage of different generations sitting in the middle, we actually have stable priced energy solutions forever. It's a solution that you can, once it's there, obviously you have to replace it, but it becomes a known cost, and consumers will love it. It'll be incredibly predictable, and we'll electrify things. We'll clean up the air as a result of this. So what's not to like? It's a win-win for everyone. Sounds amazing. So you mentioned at the moment that lithium batteries is the current solution for energy storage. Is there anything? Well, there's two current solutions at the moment. Lithium ion batteries for short durations, traditional pumped hydro for longer durations. They're really the only two that are on the market today where you could go to the bank and say, can I borrow some money to build a project like this? They're really the only two in the energy storage space. There are a number of other solutions, including ours, which are emerging very rapidly. So we're at the point in our technology journey where we're building a demonstration project down in the southwest of the UK. I was there yesterday in an incredibly rainy day. I got soaked. But we're about eight weeks into that build of that demonstration project. And then off the back of that, we'll have a really fantastic, reasonably good scale technology demonstrator, which will enable us to launch into what we call a Series A funding round, which enable us to grow the business, improve the technology, scale the technology, look at more markets. And so we're very much on this growth journey as a UK company and growing into the future and solving some of the sort of fundamental problems that the UK faced at the moment. Yeah, it sounds like you're ideal for an investor that's got that's really keen on sustainable projects. Absolutely. So what I'm interested in, obviously, what you're doing is fantastic, but I think it'd be interesting for the listeners, if you could just take us to what you did before and how you got to this particular place of co-founding such a ground breaking business. Yeah, I've had an unusual career to get to where I am now. And if you just looked at the start and the end, you'd go, how did that happen? But if you took someone through it, then it's a clear journey. So I started in three-dimensional design. I did interiors and furniture. Then I moved into architecture and then into the integration of renewable energies into architectural projects. And then from there into renewable energy and the innovation in renewable energy. So prior to this, I'd co-founded a wind turbine company with the head of rotor systems from Vesta to the world's largest wind turbine manufacturing company. And so that sort of movement into the innovation. And then we came up with this idea. It was a conversation between myself and Thomas about how do you solve this energy storage problem? And you have this very mature solution of traditional pumped hydro, but it has some challenges. And how through innovation, can you solve those challenges? So the challenges that they have are things like water abstraction, lack of sites. The sites are too far from people, means you've got to put pylons up across the landscape. They're offering in areas of natural beauty, et cetera, et cetera. And the projects just take 15 to 20 years to consent and then construct, which makes them very difficult to finance. So our question to ourselves is, what can you do with innovation, which is what I love. And Thomas also loves being imaginative about how you can take step forwards with things which already exist and how you can turn them into something better. So that's really what we're doing is we're not reinventing the wheel. We're putting a better tire on an existing wheel. And so that's what we're doing. And one thing I really like to say is that high density hydro is an innovative company and a solution. And lots of companies talk about having a secret source. But because we have this new fluid, we actually do have a secret source. It really is a source. And the fluid we use is very dense. So it's more than the density of concrete. So it's a fluid, free running fluid, a bit like barista oat milk, something like that. And yet it's so dense that if you put a concrete block on it, the concrete would float. So it's a really unusual fluid. And when you start putting your hands in it, you get pushed back on it, it's really hard to imagine. A bit into the Dead Sea. Yeah, it's like that. But much more so. I think the density of the Dead Sea is about 1.3 times. I don't know exactly, but about 1.3 times the density of water, because it's two and a half times. So it's like that, but so much more so. I mean, if you try to walk on it, you'd probably only sink down to just above your knees in it. So we say just above your knees, but how much? How deep would the water be? Yeah, so you get to the point where the pressure from the fluid would exceed your weight. So you'd get down somewhere in your thighs. And then even if the fluid was deeper, you wouldn't sink any further in it, because there's the mass of your body isn't sufficient to displace the noise. It would be like three meters, but you're still walking on your knee. Wow. You'd still be in a liquid, but you only could sink as far as your thighs. OK, so just tell me why that density is important. So it's all about increasing the density enables you to make projects smaller or on lower elevations. So we're increasing the pressure or we're increasing the energy density of the project. So it just enables us to do the same things either in a much smaller space. At the same performance and the same power output or energy longevity in a much smaller space, or you can reduce the elevation, which gives you orders of magnitude more sites. So I'm just in the next Hampstead Heath and Hampstead Heath is probably just about high enough for us. It's a sort of elevation that you could do it on. I'm sure we'd find it difficult to get permission to do it on Hampstead Heath book, but just to give you an idea. But certainly when we look across the UK, we've got this fantastic GIS map that we use. We have internally, I call Adam, and he does these sort of surveys for us. And in the UK, we think there are at least six and a half thousand sites for us. Well, if you look at traditional pumped hydro, it's probably in the order of 20 that have got viable sites left. So it's orders of magnitude differently. And we find that the project sites are spread out across the whole country. With the exception of East Anglia, we don't find many sites in East Anglia, but nearly everywhere else, including to the south of London, south coast, certainly all the way up through the Midlands, Wales, you know, you name it, we find sites where we could conceivably put a project. Just in total layman's terms, Steve, I just want to see if I answered this right. So effectively, we get some energy from, you know, wind farm or solar. We don't need it now. It goes to this dense liquid that there for a long time. We push that, we use a pump to push that dense liquid up the hill. Okay. And is there any energy leakage? And leakage is probably slightly the wrong word, because we don't really lose anything in terms of the fluid or anything like that. But the act, you push it up the hill. And so you're using an electric motor and a mechanical pump to push it up the hill. And you can never have anything that is 100% efficient. So the act of taking electricity and turning a pump and pushing this fluid up the hill, you get some losses. So what you end up at the top of the hill, you've got slightly less than you put in. And then you get the same when you go back down, it comes back down, the hill goes through a turbine, and then through back through an electrical generator and then back to the grid. So each one of these stages loses a small amount of energy. So what happens is you of the 100% of energy you put in, you get about 80% back. So your energy storage, and it doesn't matter which type of energy storage you look at, whether it's different type of batteries or perverting it to hydrogen and then back to electricity. It doesn't matter which one you use. They all have a, you never maintain a 100% efficiency. And so there are... So let me... And correct if I'm obviously, because I'm obviously quite lame on this. So if I've got a field in a hill, and I've got some wind turbines, and then there's a way that the wind turbines are as electricity, and it goes to this dense liquid, your solution, this high density hydro. Are you saying that 20% of what it generates will be lost getting to the storage? And then if it stayed there for a while, like a year or so, how much more would energy would be lost? No. Round, well. Yeah. So it's the round for proficiency. And for us... So from the electricity from the wind turbine, in this instance, through our system, and then back to the electricity power grid. So it's the whole thing. So it's going from electricity back to electricity. You lose 20%. Okay. And it doesn't matter whether that... You hold it for a day, or for a half a week, or a whole week. You don't lose any more by holding it there. But it's just the... As you convert, move it. That's when you use it. And what's the longest it would need to wait before the grid was ready for it? You would expect it to be operating on a daily basis. So what you find is that when you're looking at grids dominated by solar, it's a daily cycle. You get Sunday in the day, and you've got a morning and evening peak and some at night, and you're discharging on a daily cycle. So you'd use a 10 or 12 hour project like ours 365 days a year. So that would be on a grid dominated by wind. It's a little bit different. The wind weather systems tend to average two a week. So rather than a daily cycle, you've got a twice weekly cycle of wind. So it's a slightly different case, but the basic principle is you store when there's excess renewable energy, and when there's not enough, you return it back to the grid, which ultimately feeds the consumer or industry. And you don't have to be right next to the wind turbine or the solar farm. You can be down the road or even tens of miles away and use the grid as your roadway for the electrons to flow from your wind turbines to your energy store, and then from there onto the consumer. So you use the power infrastructure of the country to move the electrons around, to be where you want them, when you want them. Okay, so can I just ask you another naive question? So what you need is effectively, in terms of this wrong, so you need either what solar panels generating electricity or wind turbine electricity, your your high density hydro needs to be near them, and then a way of connecting them. And then, and then, is there a way that it needs to be connected to the grid somewhere? Is there a place that it needs to be easily connected to the grid or is that connected? Yeah, so when you have it's all connected to the grid, you know, the grid is like the road network in the way that you walk out your front door, and then you go to the shops either on the pavement or in the car, and then you go in the shop. So you could say that the shop is like the wind generator, and it's connected via the roads to your house. And it's the same, same with the power system, that you effectively have a road system, which is the grid infrastructure. So that's at high voltages, it's the pylons that you see, or at lower voltage, it's those the the the telegraph poles with the wires on the top. And so that's your grid infrastructure, and then sometimes it's buried under the road. But it all comes into, you know, someone's house, and it goes into shops, and that's, and it's connected via the grid infrastructure of the country back to your wind farms, solar farms, gas peaking plants, anaerobic digestion, nuclear power stations, it's all interconnected through the power grid. And so you can be close to, you can be right next to the wind farm and right next to the consumer, or you can be somewhere else, because you're just connected via the road network, in effect, or in this case, the power network. So do you need to someone that's got a wind farm or a solar farm, or is that something someone just had a field or a hill, you could create that as well? Yeah, absolutely. So you don't need, so people are already building the wind farms and the solar farms. So they're already generating electricity and putting it into the power grid. And what that does is, as you get too much electricity in the power grid, the prices go down is that the power grid is trying to encourage people to use more when you've got excess. And then when there's not enough wind or solar, then prices go up, because they're trying to encourage people to use less. And so you get this big price volatility. So what we're doing is we help to sit in the middle and smooth that price volatility out. Okay, so you could have an existing farm. You just say we can solve the price volatility form of this particular farm, or if they just had a hill, you could provide not only the storage, but also you can add the electricity generating solar or wind farm as well. Yeah, absolutely. But they don't have to be in the same place. We can be distant from them as well. How far could you be for it still to work? Well, there's probably, you know, technically almost no limit, actually. So, so quite an interesting project that's been discussed at the moment is that there's a proposal for a power cable to go from Morocco to the UK. Right. And so you generate your solar power in Morocco, you send it under the sea all the way to the UK. And so once it's going under the sea, just electrons going down that down a pipe or along a wire. And so you could, in that instance, you could put your energy storage in Morocco and be near the solar farm, or you could put it where it lands in the UK and be, as it comes in, you can store it when it comes in during Morocco's daytime hours, which are nearly the same as the UK's. But and then you say you could store it in the UK. So actually, there is, you know, it's not really a distance issue. It's there's sort of technology about voltages and losses and things like that, which affect how you would do it and the cost of doing it. But they don't have to be near each other. OK, I suppose near would be better because then we'll suppose the investment be higher because then you've got to create the cable. Yeah, I mean, the cables already exist. Right. So it's, you know, going back to someone's house and the supermarket analogy is that you could, and there's roads in between, you can choose to walk to your corner shop and buy certain things, or you can choose to go further to a much bigger super market. But they're all just connected together. And so, as the consumer, you use the road network to get to the shops. And it's the same and the shops in our analogy is the which the generation and different shops are different types of generation, whether they're wind or solar, but ultimately all connects back together. And you could choose to go if you lived in London to a shop in Edinburgh. You know, you could do, but you know, it's not very sensible, but you could do if that's what you wanted to do. So the bottom connects to the network, suppose going straight to the grid, it goes straight to your storage because the grid is not ready for it. But no, that storage could be along way away. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. OK, I think it's really helpful. Very interesting, very new topic for me, but really helpful. So if an investor that is really keen on investing in great groundbreaking products like this one, how would they get in touch with you to explore this further? Yeah, just we have a form in our website of anyone who's interested in either investment, or if they think they've got a good site, or if they're a project developer, or we have a form in our website, which is reenergized.com. And fill in that form, let us know who you are. And we'll be back to you. And that is R-H-E-E-N-E-R-G-I-S-E.com. Yeah, that's correct. And we do go to ask the question, why have you got an H in REE? And it's the word, it comes from rheology. So rheology is the sort of the composition of fluids. So, and we've created our secret source. So, hence the REE from rheology. Very interesting. Yeah. And anyway, Stephen, that's been very interesting. And I want to congratulate you on, on, you know, putting your time and effort in something that's going to change the planet, you know, save all of us, you know, so much needs doing, and there's a lot of people doing it. So, it's great that we've got people like yourselves that are doing things that are going to have a massive lasting social impact as well as something that would also benefit from a cost-wide point of view for consumers and energy companies alike. So, thank you very much, Stephen. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Jamie. It's been a real pleasure. And just to sort of finish on a really positive note, is that, you know, it can feel that the problem of climate change and the energy transition is just too big. But actually, we don't feel like that, because we can see that there are solutions emerging that are really viable and can actually make the difference that you can retire fossil fuels in a reasonable time scale. And you can mitigate the effects of climate change and ultimately solve it. So, we're actually feel really positive about the future. And I know that not all people feel that, that there is climate anxiety. But, you know, we are positive because we have solutions for this big problem. Thank you, Stephen. That sounds fantastic. Thank you very much. Thank you very
