Episode 131: Liz Allan and Dougie Blair - Unlocking the Potential of Microgrids and Solar Power

Episode 131: Liz Allan and Dougie Blair - Unlocking the Potential of Microgrids and Solar Power. 

Liz Allan speaks to Dougie Blair, Director at Beyond Innovation, to explore the evolving landscape of energy systems, electric vehicle (EV) charging, and microgrid technology. Dougie shares insights from his extensive career in renewable energy innovation, including his work on small-scale wind turbines, hydro turbines, and off-grid energy solutions. They delve into the challenges faced by EV drivers, the role of vehicle-to-load (V2L) technology, and why net metering and peer-to-peer energy trading could revolutionise the UK’s energy market. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in sustainable energy solutions, EV infrastructure, and how businesses can take control of their energy costs.

Dougie Blair Bio:
Dougie Blair is the Director of Beyond Innovation, a consultancy specialising in renewable energy solutions, microgrid technology, and electric vehicle charging strategies. With a product design and engineering background, Dougie has developed over 200 products for the renewable sector, the military, and outdoor enthusiasts. His expertise spans wind and hydropower, battery storage, and smart energy solutions. Passionate about driving sustainable change, Dougie works with businesses to optimise their energy consumption, reduce reliance on the grid, and integrate EV charging into holistic energy systems. Through Beyond Innovation, he is leading the charge in helping organisations transition towards a more resilient and self-sufficient energy future.

Quote of the Episode:
“If we want to encourage people to switch to electric vehicles, the charging experience has to be seamless. Right now, it’s not. That needs to change.” – Dougie Blair.

Dougie Blair Links:
Website: https://www.beyondinnovation.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougie-blair-051900182

Episode Keywords:
Microgrids, renewables industry, electric vehicle charging, battery management system, vehicle-to-load capability, peer-to-peer energy trading, net metering, solar PV, grid connection, energy consultant

Episode Ha

Transcript

Liz Allan  [00:00:01]:
Okay. So today I have with me Dougie Blair and he is the director at Beyond Innovation. Thank you ever so much for joining me Dougie. Everybody watching, listening, you're gonna love this because this man I'm gonna say this. You are a real innovator. You've blown my mind with some of the stuff we've already talked about. And you've had such a varied career from developing EV training courses to designing wind turbines and microgrids.

Liz Allan  [00:00:32]:
Am I right?

Dougie Blair [00:00:34]:
Yeah. And lots of other things. Yes.

Liz Allan  [00:00:37]:
So can we start by explaining how we met? I'll do that after you've kind of given us a bit of a bit of a bit of your background. So please give us a little overview of how you got into this space and what drives your passion for it. And tell everybody what the space is for a start off because there's a lot of things.

Dougie Blair [00:01:00]:
Yeah. I actually got into inventing things because I come from a family of inventors. I was brought up with a father who used to invent products for the National Cobalt. And I just thought, that's what you do when you grow up. So when I got to a certain age, around about year February, I got into designing, developing a whole range of different products. And over the years since, I've developed over 200 products for the renewables industry, for the outdoor enthusiast who wants to climb Everest with a satellite phone, who wants to climb Everest with a satellite phone and wants to power a satellite phone from solar, etcetera. Loads of different types of products. Products for the MOD, products for the Metropolitan Police, and a variety of renewable products like small-scale wind turbines, hydro turbines, and scale wind turbines, hydro turbines, and so on.

Dougie Blair [00:01:53]:
A lot of really interesting stuff. And unwittingly, throughout that period, I was educating myself on how stuff works. Mhmm. So to invent things, you have to know how stuff works. So you have to do a lot of research. And as you're developing those products, you find what doesn't work. And eventually you work out what does work. And unwittingly, I was priming myself to do what I do now, which is consultation work in energy in general.

Dougie Blair [00:02:21]:
Mhmm. And that's what I now focus on is energy, EVs, EV charging, micro grids, and just helping businesses to understand from an energy perspective what sort of mess they're in and how to get out of that mess using the right combination of tech to do it. So that's it in a nutshell.

Liz Allan  [00:02:41]:
Fantastic. So I'm gonna just explain to everybody how we got in contact. There was there was some there was a chat, and I can't remember who it was. It might have been, it could have been Mark Stubbs from Gserve, but I can't quite remember if it was him. But whoever it was, I put a post on LinkedIn about them charging their EV. In fact, no. I don't think it was Mark, actually, now come to think of it. About them charging their EV, and they couldn't understand why they weren't getting the speed that they thought they should be getting, wasn't it? And I put a comment on, and then you put a comment on that blew my mind.

Liz Allan  [00:03:22]:
And I jumped straight on LinkedIn message I messaged you and I went, tell me more. I need to know about this thing. So you were talking about a VPAK dongle. Is it VPAK? V VPeak. VPeak dongle.

Dougie Blair [00:03:37]:
Yes.

Liz Allan  [00:03:39]:
That basically provides information on what your car is asking for a charger and what the charger is able to provide you. Will you explain it? But you're gonna be a lot better than me explaining

Dougie Blair [00:03:57]:
this. VP dongle is basically an ODB2 interface that plugs into the ODB2 port in any electric vehicle. In fact, most modern vehicles have got one of those ports for

Liz Allan  [00:04:09]:
And it's not your dash, is it? It's under the dash?

Dougie Blair [00:04:14]:
It's usually under the steering, on the driver's side, or under the passenger side foot well, generally.

Liz Allan  [00:04:20]:
So if you're using telematics, that's the same kind of slot that you'd put in telematics. So that's where you put that in.

Dougie Blair [00:04:26]:
See, you plug into that and it's a Bluetooth dongle. So you plug into your car and then download the car scanner app onto your Android or iOS phone. The car scanner app is a free app. And the car scanner app then connects the dongle to your phone. And it allows the scanner app to read all the data that it likes from the vehicle. And it tells you everything. It's, it's an absolute it's great. It's got pages and pages and pages.

Dougie Blair [00:04:56]:
If you're a tech buff, it's great. You just get completely engrossed in it.

Liz Allan  [00:05:01]:
You go down a rabbit hole about it.

Dougie Blair [00:05:03]:
Oh, it does. It'll tell you the temperature of every battery that makes up or every module that makes up your battery in your car, etcetera. It is plus a whole load of other things. However, on page 21 of the data, it tells you when you plug into an electric vehicle charger, it tells you what the car is asking the charger to deliver and what the charger is offering. Now that's completely invaluable information. If like many EV drivers, you've plugged it into a charger and you've looked at your dash, you've looked at your app and it says you're getting 40 kilowatts. And you think, hold on, my car is capable of 50 kilowatts or a lot more. And I always pick electric vehicles which have got a very fast charging speed, very ultra-rapid charging speed.

Dougie Blair [00:05:51]:
So I usually pick 800 volt vehicles for that reason because you tend to get offered far better speeds because the public charging network is geared around 800 volt cars. Yeah. But I was being let down, won't tell you who by, I was being let down by a variety of different CPOs and kit. And anytime I phoned those CPOs and said, hold on a minute, my car's only pulling 50 kilowatts or whatever. I would get the usual spiel, which was, did you preheat your battery before he arrived, etcetera, etcetera. And just pointing to everything other than it's the kit, it's the charger that's causing the problem. So I thought, how do I get to the bottom of o d b two dongle, the VP dongle. Then I got one from Amazon.

Dougie Blair [00:06:41]:
They're about £20 and they're really cheap. Plugged it in the first time I was out and about. And hey, presto, it told me what the problem was and it was the charger. So I did a screenshot, posted it on LinkedIn, didn't go down a storm because obviously you're pointing fingers. But it actually, within the various companies that I did that with, they did get in contact with me and said, we wouldn't have known otherwise that we actually had a fundamental balancing problem with our kit unless someone like yourself had told us and gave us real data to prove what was going on. It actually helped them get to the bottom of some of the issues they had, which they've now resolved. I've been back at some of those sites since, and it's worked flawlessly since. So it does work.

Dougie Blair [00:07:27]:
But I had a bit of a bad experience last week. Won't tell you who it was with. But, a couple of different places that I went to. Plugged in my car. I had preheated the car and I was offered 40 kilowatts on a one fifty. And I've got a Genesis GV 60 sport plus, 800 volt architecture. It should take two, three, five kilowatts max and it regularly does. Plugged it into an ultra rapid charger.

Dougie Blair [00:07:50]:
I was the only person there, 40 kilowatts. And I heard I hear him go again. And that's not good. The industry has got to get away from doing that. It has to be possible to monitor what's going on in the background with chargers to just look for odd behavior like that. If somebody is the only person that's plugged in, there's a good chance it's not a car that can only take 41 kilowatts or 42 kilowatts because it's hard to buy an EV today that can only take 41 kilowatts. So you think it would go, hold on a minute, that's a bit odd. What are they driving? Even if they had a camera at the site, they could look and see what the car is in real time.

Dougie Blair [00:08:31]:
If there's a big flag that comes up at their end to say, there's something odd happening at that site. Let's have a look and see what's going on.

Dougie Blair [00:08:38]:
Because you can't have people turn it up expecting to be there in a way within ten, fifteen minutes to get from, you know, sort of thirty to 60%, for example, which I could have done. And then I ended up stuck because my Genesis has got a rather weird quack. You can't stop a charging session from inside the Genesis. Oh, really? If you start the charging session, not with the app, if you start it with a bank card, which I did. There's no button to stop the charging session.

Liz Allan  [00:09:09]:
Oh my god. Okay.

Dougie Blair [00:09:10]:
And the screen on the charger wasn't visible, so there was no stop icon to press because the screen was blank, no way to disconnect.

Liz Allan  [00:09:17]:
Oh, no.

Dougie Blair [00:09:18]:
And I thought, how do you get out of this without phoning them? And then the only way around it is to go into your settings and the charger settings in the Genesis and lower your target state of charge to 50%. It won't go less than 50. And then just hang around and wait till your card gets to 50%. At which point it says, your charging session is complete. You can now disconnect, and then you can get out and unplug it, which is what I had to do. But I was doing it at 41 kilowatts all the way from 30% to 50%. And I thought, this is not good.

Dougie Blair [00:09:49]:
So, yeah, we need to get away from doing that. If we're gonna encourage people to switch to electric vehicles, it has to be seamless for the most part, for most people, for most sessions. Yeah. And it's not. It's not. It's simply not.

Liz Allan  [00:10:02]:
And if they and if and if the information, so we talked about this before we were recording, weren't we? That actually, there is one charge point manufacturer that provides the information on screen about what the charger can actually potentially give you at a certain level, so certain levels.

Dougie Blair [00:10:27]:
If you plug in a 400 volt EV, it will tell you what the maximum charging power is available at 400 volts. If you plug in an 800 volt EV, it will tell you what the maximum available power, including load balancing or not. It will tell you. And just basic information, everyone did that, then we're gonna know roughly what's going on when you plug a car in and it's not charging.

Liz Allan  [00:10:48]:
But what I'd love to know yeah. I I what I'd love to know, and I said this to you before, I would well, I'd like to see the because I've I've said to you and I people know who've been listening and watching this, that our our ionic can only take a maximum of 44 kilowatts. So, yours, I'm very jealous of yours, of course. At some point, we'll get there with a higher ability. So we get 44, and a lot of the time, I'm not getting that. This one time I've actually got 46, which was amazing, with one charger. But what I'd like to see is some intelligent, you know, there's intelligence between these, you know, in these systems that they don't necessarily need to know, you know, they don't know the car unless you've actually using the app. But something on screen that says you know gives you that information that says your car is asking for that.

Liz Allan  [00:11:41]:
We can only provide you with this blah blah. You know, it doesn't need to be in-depth. It just has to be simple because it would help people understand what that car can pull and what that charger can provide, and the reasons behind it. And, also, that means it would shit surely decrease the number of support calls you'd be getting going, my my EV is not pulling this and la la la. You know? Because not everybody is gonna have that dongle, are they? You know?

Dougie Blair [00:12:10]:
No. And even if you've got it, there's a lot of confusing information. You need to know what you're looking for in the app. And that's why I said earlier, if you go to page 21 of the data sheet.

Dougie Blair [00:12:22]:
Then it's charging offering. And it's that information that you actually want when you're charging your car. But it's good just to do a bit of homework before you buy an electric vehicle in the first place. The problem is people tend to not do that. They don't go into a into a one dealership and have that dealership say, ask ask a bunch of questions and then sell you, send you down the road road to a completely different dealership from a different manufacturer because actually, they, down the road, would sell you a far more appropriate EV. They're not gonna do that. So you need to get completely independent advice when it comes to selecting the right EV on the right architecture for 800 volts.

Dougie Blair [00:13:10]:
And what is the primary use case of that car? What are you planning to do with it? Is it mostly long journeys? Is it mostly local journeys? Are you really gonna need a car that can ultra rapid charge at 235 kilowatts like the Genesis? Or does it not really matter?

Liz Allan  [00:13:24]:
Do you want a do you want an about town car that you don't need? You know, you're gonna have a home charger. You're gonna put it on charge at home most of the time, and you don't have the overnight tariff, the cheap overnight tariff, or

Liz Allan  [00:13:37]:
are

Liz Allan  [00:13:37]:
you and I actually met an Uber driver recently at a charger and we got talking. And he's kind of basically saying about the chart, the prices of public charging, but also the fact that, you know, he needs to be charging some days. And this is in, he was in West London. But some days he has to go to Coventry or he'll have to go to take somebody to, East Midlands Airport or somewhere like that. And he needs to know that he's got that kind of level of reliable charging. 

Dougie Blair [00:14:09]:
Exactly. So you need to understand what you're planning to use the car for. I mean, I've always bought cars that have got vehicle to load capability and we're going to we'll come on to this anyway because vehicle to load allows me to use my car as part of my home micro grid system to run my house. So I can charge the car cheaply overnight from Octopus or EON or something like that. And then use the car as an extension to the battery capacity that's in my static storage on my micro grid system that runs my house.

Dougie Blair [00:14:36]:
And recently, I heard about that one microgrid system that runs my house. Mhmm. And recently, that last storm just a few weeks ago, two weeks ago, knocked the power out in our area for four days. But we weren't without power because we were sitting with two electric vehicles. A Genesis GV 60 sport plus and an MG Cybuster, which is really quite nice.

Liz Allan  [00:14:55]:
Oh my goodness.

Dougie Blair [00:14:56]:
It is. But it's also a good vehicle to load at 3.6 kilowatts. So we had the Cybuster plugged in until it got down to 50% because that's the lowest charge state it'll discharge to. Whereas the Genesis, you can programme it all the way down to 20%.

Liz Allan  [00:15:10]:
Oh, can you? Wow.

Dougie Blair [00:15:11]:
Which is great. Gives you a lot of access to lots of batteries. Yeah. Yeah. Which, if you're like me, that's quite exciting. Yes. Yeah. So, yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:15:21]:
So that's why I choose the cars I choose. It's not because it's not more, it's not just because I like the look of the car, and I like driving them. They have to tick a lot of boxes that most people don't consider. But when you think of that level of investment, you want the car to have more than just one use, which is driving from A to B. If it can buy cheap power overnight and run your house, and then you don't end up buying power at 26 p because that's what happens to be the price cap at this point, then why not?

Liz Allan  [00:15:49]:
And you don't get that from petrol and diesel cars, do you?

Dougie Blair [00:15:52]:
No. You can't put them in.

Liz Allan  [00:15:53]:
Do you know what I mean?

Dougie Blair [00:15:54]:
It's like a generator. Yeah.

Liz Allan  [00:15:55]:
Yeah. Just before we go onto microgrids, I just wanna I wanted to step back a second, and I'd like to discuss dealerships. And I've just discussed dealerships previously with other people I've been interviewing because I have and I've experienced this myself. I have my own opinions about the information that they provide to you, still or don't at dealerships, because you're you're kind of you know, you were saying earlier, you need to get that information from the dealership. But, actually, even the dealerships at the moment, it feels to me, don't have that information or don't want to give you that information because, you know, I've been to our local dealership, and you know which car I've got, so I'm not gonna say who they are. But because you already know it. And I've had quite a bit of negativity from them about, oh, well, I, you know, I don't believe in electric cars and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, good god.

Liz Allan  [00:16:53]:
I'm at a dealership, and you're saying this stuff to me. And, you know, how are you actually selling these vehicles? You know? And having enough information for that person to make that informed decision.

Dougie Blair [00:17:07]:
Well, my experience of dealing with dealerships has always been not good. That's the best way to describe it. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm always unduly prepared when I go to buy something. It's, you know, an electric vehicle, for example. And, yeah. I suppose it's just sort of an awkward streak in me that I'll go in there with some questions I know they can't possibly answer. Like, yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:17:35]:
Yeah. Well, but even asking basics like, does it do a vehicle to load?

Liz Allan  [00:17:39]:
Oh, boy. Yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:17:40]:
What's the capability? And they look they look at you as if you've got horns. And then could you show me what the charging curve looks like? Now you can download it online. And they don't even have the gumption to have a charging curve sitting in front of you to say, right, this is what the charging curve looks like. And again, that's why I picked the Genesis GV 60. All this 10 to 80% nonsense. No. It's you wanna keep the charging speed as high as possible, as quick as possible, for as long as possible. And the g v 60 will still be doing 80 or 90 kilowatts at 90%, and then it tails off.

Dougie Blair [00:18:15]:
So 10 to 80%, it's just a legacy discussion that seems to have got into the psyche of EV drivers that 10 to 80% is the sweet spot. Yeah. Depending on what car it is. Do your homework. Pick a car that's got a charging curve that actually does what you need it to do. And then that 10 to 80% piece just evaporates and you'll do 10 to 90 or 10 to 95 or 5 to 95 or whatever it's gonna be. But, and there are some charging cards that are completely crazy. If you look at some charging cards, they can claim on paper. Yeah, the car can take 75 kilowatts.

Dougie Blair [00:18:52]:
Yeah. For the first few percent and then it nosedives. So it's not really capable of 50 kilowatts, well technically it is. But it's only a 50 kilowatts for the sake of being able to claim it's a 50 kilowatts for five minutes.

Liz Allan  [00:19:06]:
Yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:19:06]:
And that really annoys me.

Dougie Blair [00:19:08]:
You need a charging curve that stays as high as possible for as long as possible. And of course the BMS is there, the battery management system in the car. The BMS is there to protect the battery. And you got all sorts of people, again, you know you've seen this yourself and heard this yourself, LinkedIn and social media. Or don't don't don't ultra rapid charge or don't rapid charge your car all the time. Or don't use a home charger all the time. Always do a good mix because it's good for the battery. You're not gonna own the car long enough to for the battery to ever be a problem in modern EVs.

Dougie Blair [00:19:43]:
Modern EVs have got a battery management system that's well written. It's called a battery management system. It's there to manage the battery so that you don't screw up.

Liz Allan  [00:19:52]:
I like that. Yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:19:53]:
If you can't screw up, it it reaps itself. You give it some power, it will behave itself. It will look after itself.

Liz Allan  [00:20:00]:
Yeah. It says what it does on the tin. That's the thing, isn't it?

Dougie Blair [00:20:04]:
And then companies like exactly. Companies like Volt Test are now beginning to publish some interesting information about cars. They've they've they've they've done a state of health in various scenarios. And recently they posted on LinkedIn, I can't remember the two vehicles, but they posted both vehicles have done about 65,000 miles and they were at 90%, 96% state of health. One car had virtually always been rapid charged, and the other had virtually always not been rapid charged, and they were both at 96%.

Dougie Blair [00:20:39]:
And you feel you just go, see? Yeah. I told you. But instead, everyone's, oh, I'm not gonna buy an electric carcass. What's about when it comes to changing the batteries? What are you talking about? The carcass will fall to bits before the bathroom is dead.

Liz Allan  [00:20:51]:
I mean, you know these things. We know these things, don't we? The misinformation out there, Dougie, it's just it shocking.

Dougie Blair [00:20:59]:
It's actually, I think, hilarious. I think I know. You can deliberately start something and by the end of that day, it has become a fact despite the fact that you made it up. It's just complete nonsense, half of this. In fact, the majority of it is complete nonsense. But it's that you can see why some people just treat it as a bit of a game though. They'll just make up something and before you know it, it has become fact when it's never been a fact in the first place.

Liz Allan  [00:21:27]:
But when we're talking about people making a right making an informed decision, we're both getting on our orange boxes now, aren't we, but hey? When people are making that informed decision, when you're all you're doing is trying to swim through misinformation soup.

Dougie Blair [00:21:42]:
Indeed. You would think the best place to get properly sanitised information would be dealerships.

Liz Allan  [00:21:50]:
I know but it's not.

Dougie Blair [00:21:51]:
But dealerships are skewing their advice based on what they sell and the knowledge of what they sell.

Liz Allan  [00:21:57]:
Or lack of. 

Dougie Blair [00:21:58]:
The first question yeah. And the first question to the customer, since okay. There are a few brands out there that do cars that sort of tick most boxes all the time. Mhmm. But there are plenty of brands that don't take a lot of boxes. But they'll still sell plenty of vehicles. Yeah. But the people that work in there are being tasked to sell electric vehicles from that manufacturer.

Dougie Blair [00:22:19]:
So they're not going to highlight all the shortcomings of what they're offering. What's really required is that you need people who are completely independent, they have no axe to grind, and don't work for any of these companies. I mean, this is what I do for all my clients anyway. If my clients take me on as their energy consultant, then I just give them the harsh mistakes they've made. And I'm quite brutal about it because why shouldn't I be? Mhmm. Because they've believed all the hype online or they've one of their pals has googled something and vehicles to fleet vehicles and then they've realized they're going to be sitting most of their time at service stations waiting for the car to charge because they bought 400 volt EV that can only charge a hundred kilowatts or something like that and it's got a rubbish charge curve. And you think, oh, how did that happen? And it's because they didn't take impartial advice from somebody that tried to understand what they're trying to achieve, what a typical use case would look like, and then make a short list of vehicles that fit that use case. And then give the pros and cons about each of those vehicles to then let them make an informed decision.

Dougie Blair [00:23:34]:
That's what they should have done, but they don't. Yeah. So they waste the money and then they worry about getting out of the deals, and then in a three-year contract, and, just, you don't, it's just rubbish.

Liz Allan  [00:23:45]:
I've said this before on the podcast though, you don't know what you don't know. And actually

Liz Allan  [00:23:50]:
I know.

Liz Allan  [00:23:50]:
This is why it's good to actually have to have you on here so people can hear it. And then they can find you on the you know, I'll put it in the show notes and make sure that they can talk to you. And I'm and I think it's great that you are actually being, you know, really honest and forthright with them because you don't wanna be just massaging their ego and going, oh, of course, you've done the right thing, do you?

Dougie Blair [00:24:13]:
Well, before I take any client on, I offer them a one-hour zoom call. They haven't paid for my services. They haven't decided whether they want me as their energy consultant. So they've got an hour to pick my brains about anything they like. It's like a live CV. They're interrogating me for an hour to see whether I know what I'm talking about. At the end of that hour, they'll either decide to take my services on or they don't. And if they don't, it doesn't really matter.

Dougie Blair [00:24:40]:
If I've told them information that's helped them, then great. If they decide they don't want to take my services on, it doesn't really matter. There are plenty of people who do want to employ my services for various reasons. And it's always because they've got themselves in a mess usually. And then they want somebody to get them out of a mess. Yeah. And then I get involved and then try and undo the mess and fix them. 

Dougie Blair [00:25:07]:
But it's good fun because you can see the logic that got them into the mess and then you can point out why that was illogical for them to have done what they did to get into that mess in the first place. And then I can put a strategy together to get them out of that mess. Yeah. I enjoy it. 

Liz Allan  [00:25:23]:
It's that holistic picture of what the problems are. So let's start talking about microgrids because this is a really important part.

Dougie Blair [00:25:32]:
This is all tied in.

Liz Allan  [00:25:34]:
What you do, all of this. So can you start off by and I know we've talked to we've mentioned microgrids, but comprise of? What does it do? And how are you managing this?

Dougie Blair [00:25:52]:
Well, a microgrid can take many different forms depending on what's its background they've got. But the sort of microgrids that I'm involved in, the ones I design are a combination of renewables. So typically, solar PV, wind, hydro, etcetera.

Liz Allan  [00:26:20]:
Mhmm.

Dougie Blair [00:26:20]:
And battery storage. Now, as soon as you mentioned renewables and battery storage, you get this vision of four kilowatts of solar on the roof of a house and a Tesla power wall in the garage. Yeah. Right. We're not talking about that. We're talking about industrial scale PV on the roof of industrial premises. So hundred, two, two hundred, five hundred, six hundred kilowatts peak of PV into four, five, six hundred kilowatt hours of battery storage with inverter capabilities capable of running the entire business.

Liz Allan  [00:26:58]:
Right.

Dougie Blair [00:26:58]:
Now, typically, the systems I'm designing are used on farms. Dairy farms are classic. I had no intention of looking for dairy farm clients. I was referred to a dairy farmer about two years ago who came out of contract at the start of the Ukraine-Russia war when energy prices became chaotic.

Liz Allan  [00:27:20]:
Yeah. They

Dougie Blair [00:27:20]:
came out of an energy contract at 15p a kilowatt and went on to 66p for a two-year deal. I got an alarming phone call to say, we've just ended up at 66 p deal. How do I get myself out of this? I said, become self sufficient. Become self sufficient and it doesn't matter whether it's 66p or £6.66 a kilo. Yeah. You've no intention of buying any power at that rate anyway. So it doesn't matter what tariff you're on. You just need technology that effectively removes you from the grid, but not entirely.

Dougie Blair [00:27:53]:
Some people want to disconnect from the grid so they don't have any bills. Again, that's not an easy thing to do. And it's not easy because most businesses are yet to transition to EVs in their fleets. So their energy profile today isn't the same as what it's going to be in two, three, four years' time when they switch all their electric, all their vehicles to electric. So I keep telling them, look, keep the grid connection there but minimise what you buy from the grid.

Liz Allan  [00:28:21]:
And

Dougie Blair [00:28:21]:
to do that, I design bespoke microgrid solutions. Now I don't install these. I design the systems and then get people from within the industry who are microgrid experts to put the kit together and to deploy and look after that kit. I look after the data that the kit provides. But those microgrids invariably involve existing PV that the business has already put in, that they put in based on a solar installer having told them it would get them, you know, 60% self consumption. And self consumption and self sufficiency are two completely different things.

Liz Allan  [00:28:58]:
Go on. Okay.

Dougie Blair [00:28:59]:
Self-consumption is the amount of power that a real-time solar installation or wind installation will consume on a business. So if you fit solar panels to the roof of a dairy farm that milk cows at 04:00 in the morning and 04:00 in the afternoon, you know it's gonna do nothing to their bills because they don't milk cows at 12:00 in the middle of the day when solar is at its peak. Yeah. And yet, go into most dairy farms and they've got solar on the roof. Right. And you feel that taking them aside and giving them a good shake and go and say, how did you end up with solar on your roof? You're a dairy farm that melts in the morning and at night. So it's always because the solar industry is very good at selling their wares. They've got a van full of solar panels.

Dougie Blair [00:29:41]:
You've got a roof. You've got a big bill. Therefore, you're gonna get solar panels on your roof because you're gonna have a great you're gonna have outcome and you're gonna have a huge level of self consumption from your system. When in fact, that's never the case. You rarely come across a business that has an energy profile that matches a solar PV production unless you're a garden centre. How odd is that? If you look at the energy profiles of the garden center, they go through the roof in the middle of the day because everyone in the cafe is getting tea, buns, toasties, and hot food. Yeah. So the kitchen's running full tilt.

Dougie Blair [00:30:19]:
So, the energy consumption is running at full tilt. And everyone spends their afternoons in garden centres meeting their pals.

Liz Allan  [00:30:26]:
That's what

Liz Allan  [00:30:26]:
My friends and I did it yesterday, actually. Yeah. Yeah. We did.

Dougie Blair [00:30:30]:
Sorry. I'm at that age.

Liz Allan  [00:30:32]:
So Me too.

Dougie Blair [00:30:33]:
Exactly. So the garden centre and the solar panels work really well. You don't really need much battery storage apart from overnight consumption from walk-in fridges and freezers that create a background energy consumption profile. But going back to how I got into this, that particular dairy farm, I solved their problem. Got them to 93% self sufficiency. Not self consumption, 93 self sufficiency with a system that involved quite a chunk of solar, lots of battery storage, and effectively an off grid system. So this is a system that runs the farm.

Dougie Blair [00:31:13]:
It has a grid connection but as an input only to the system. 

Dougie Blair [00:31:17]:
And that's because DNOs get involved in discussions if you traditionally have a hybrid connection to the grid because you're using the grid to synchronize with the kit. The systems I designed don't synchronize the grid to the kit. There's no export capability. There's no inversion on the grid. There are no inverters on the grid. So invariably, there's no d n o involvement. So in the same way that you can buy a kettle out of curry, go home, switch it on, and don't have to phone your DNO to ask for permission to switch a kettle on because it's an import only device. I design micro grids that are import only devices, but essentially off-grid micro grids. Yeah. So they've got charter input. That's the best way to describe it. I wouldn't go into too many details because it'll give the game away for people that think that's a damn good idea for us. Why don't we do that?

Liz Allan  [00:32:04]:
No. We're not doing that. Not doing that.

Dougie Blair [00:32:06]:
No. We're not doing that. So yes. The front end of these micro grids is import only. In other words, you couldn't export. It's impossible to export. The kit has no export capabilities. So the micro grid will pull power from the grid, but it'll only do it based on a hierarchy of cheapness of power going into the microgrid.

Dougie Blair [00:32:26]:
And what I mean by that is, if you've got solar PV on the roof, wind turbine, because you invested one and one under the feed-in tariff scheme years, you might have a diesel generator because you have a dairy farm and you really need to have one. Then there's therefore a hierarchy of cheap cost of power going into that microgrid. The cheapest being solar at roughly 4 to 4 and a half pence a kilowatt levelized cost. Then potentially wind because it will have paid for itself under the feed and tariff already, therefore it's kind of free. Then it's a diesel generator, which at 70p a liter for diesel, for red diesel, it's roughly 15 to 17p a kilowatt.

Liz Allan  [00:33:06]:
Okay.

Dougie Blair [00:33:07]:
Then it'll be your overnight tariff if you're in a split tariff from your energy supplier, which might be 18 to 20 p. Then it'll be a daytime tariff, which could be 30 p or more. So there's a hierarchy of cheap power coming into your microgrid. I then program that microgrid to always pull from cheapest first, then next cheapest, then next cheapest, and never pull during the day unless you've absolutely run out of options. Yeah. Yeah. That way, you can negotiate with your energy supplier a disproportionately high cost for daytime tariff in return for a disproportionately low nighttime tariff with the intention of never buying any power during the day.

Liz Allan  [00:33:47]:
Wow.

Dougie Blair [00:33:48]:
So the outcome for the customer is really good because they use cheap overnight power, augmented by real-time solar or wind, etcetera, etcetera, backed up by a diesel generator. It makes them power cut proof so they don't end up with power cuts at all.

Liz Allan  [00:34:04]:
God.

Dougie Blair [00:34:04]:
And they've got resilience upon resilience. They've got the grid, they've got a generator, and the micro grid. They've got three sources of power they can fall back on. So they're never gonna be out of power. And for lots of businesses that really matter. It transpires that if you get a robotic dairy, having no power cuts is really good because you don't have to reset a bunch of systems after each power cut. Even if you get a backup generator in a robotic dairy, when the generator kicks in, there's a dead spell between the grid going missing, the generator starting, the changeover switch switching over, and everything restabilising. Might take a minute, might take two minutes.

Dougie Blair [00:34:44]:
Then everything has to be rebooted and then you've got some computers that control this, that, and the next thing. It's just rubbish. And why are we tolerating that? This is 2025.

Liz Allan  [00:34:55]:
Just make it seamless. You go to your bed, you get up, you do whatever you're gonna do, and don't worry about it.

Dougie Blair [00:34:55]:
Seamless. You go to your bed, you get up, you do whatever you're gonna do, and don't worry about where your power's coming from. Someone else is looking after that for you to make sure you buy next to nothing from the grid. That's my job.

Dougie Blair [00:35:08]:
However, things get really quite interesting, which I touched on earlier. I pick the electric vehicles I've got because I've got my own personal microgrid at home.

Dougie Blair [00:35:17]:
We run our business from home. We've got a very energy efficient house. We run lots of heat pumps. It's it's it's obscene. But we bought the electric vehicles we've got because of the vehicle to load capability. Now before widespread vehicle-to-grid becomes a thing, vehicle-to-load is quite common nowadays. Vehicle to load is more than capable of running your house. It's just that the vehicle to load can't connect to your house directly because it doesn't synchronise with the grid, etcetera, etcetera.

Dougie Blair [00:35:47]:
So my own microgrid is essentially an off-grid system, which means a power cut proof. But it's got grid inputs from cheap sources. For example, eight and a half pence because of where I am geographically. I don't get the cheapest of their tariffs, but it's eight and a half pence for $5 each night. So I can charge up the static storage in my microgrid overnight. Also, battery storage in my home system, which is industrial battery storage. I just went over it. Yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:36:21]:
On an industrial battery storage. I just went overboard on it. Augmented by a further 77 kilowatts of battery within my g v 60, my Genesis g v 60, which I can take all the way down to 20% state of charge when I'm discharging that car. So I've got usable 60 or so kilowatt hours of power in the Genesis that can be used to top up the system. So in the recent power outage that we had during the storm a couple of weeks ago, we had no power outage. We had no shortage of power. And suppose it looked like we were gonna run out of power. In that case, all I have to do is just drive down to the nearest rapid charger somewhere that's still got power, charge the car back up like a like a jerry can with petrol, but it's electrons in my battery and my Genesis and then drive back home, plug it in and run my house. So, a complete no brainer if you want complete resilience, in a home system or a business system.

Dougie Blair [00:37:16]:
And when you look at businesses that go down the route of their own micro grids, they need to look at their EV fleet as part of the solution to how do you solve your energy problem overall. Having a micro grid with solar on the roof is one thing, but having a micro grid with solar on the roof and two, three, four, five cars in a car park which have charged it at domestic properties overnight on EON's seven p, seven hour tariff, coming back to work, having had that charging session covered by the workplace because it's considered a workers vehicle etcetera etcetera, you've effectively moved power from a domestic property to a business. Those cars then plug into the microgrid of the business and provide power to the business effectively at 7p. So again, why would you buy power at 30p off the grid? And then complain you've got a big bill. Do something about it. And the beauty of microgrids is this. I design microgrids which are funded through the energy savings that they provide. So if you're paying £5,000 a month in energy costs or electricity costs for a business, I I advise that business to reduce the payment to their energy supplier to a thousand pounds a month, pay £4,000 a month to their bank to borrow the money to get rid of £4,000 out of the bill.

Dougie Blair [00:38:37]:
It doesn't cost them a penny to solve the problem, but they choose not to solve the problem and just continually spend £5,000 and burn £5,000 a month with nothing to show for it. Yeah. When for the same expenditure, they end up at seventy, eighty, 90 percent self-sufficient in their business forever.

Liz Allan  [00:38:58]:
God.

Dougie Blair [00:38:58]:
So if you've got a microgrid system that's designed to get you to, let's say, 75% self sufficiency and it takes five years to pay off, that's five years of parting with the same money you would have done had we never met. But at the end of that five years, seventy five percent of your bill becomes zero forever. That's not a difficult thing to sell anyone in business. And it allows them to take control over their energy costs. And together, we practically set targets, or practical targets, that's what I mean, of achieving 75%, then maybe eighty, 85, 90- 95% self-sufficiency in the business. Getting to a %, very tricky. Because you need very reliable backup sources, which is always a diesel generator, which never ticks a green box unless it runs on HVO, so I tend to steer people away from trying to get to a %, but have a sensible target for a sensible spend to get a sensible spend to get a sensible outcome.

Dougie Blair [00:40:01]:
But you've got to think of the EVs as part of that solution and vehicle to load at this point is a great part of that solution because it's already there. You just need to pick the right cars. So in a nutshell, that's what microgrids do for businesses.

Liz Allan  [00:40:15]:
Now that's cool. And I was gonna say I'm assuming there will be other business types that have a similar maybe an energy profile to the farms that you've actually been providing?

Dougie Blair [00:40:28]:
Well, yes. From the original dairy farms that I got introduced to, I was previously involved in heavy engineering companies, injection molding companies, etcetera, who are always heavy consumers twenty-four seven. Yeah. Absolutely. So they need serious amounts of solar, serious amounts of battery storage, etcetera. But I got introduced to a whole bunch of wide and varied businesses from soft fruit growers in the Leeds area, to pig farmers, to potato farmers that supply potatoes to people that make oven chips. I won't mention their brand, but everyone knows who they are. Yes.

Dougie Blair [00:41:06]:
And I now have a whole broad range of different types of businesses. And the most interesting part of dealing with different types of businesses is once you've created an energy profile and you look at how these types of businesses consume energy, you you know when you engage a new client from that type of sector, you kinda know what you're letting yourself in for and you can very quickly let them know what they're letting themselves in for by pointing out that you're doing business with other similar types of businesses that had the same problem of that as them. In case, which has sense. I don't have to say what the outcome has been for them. Yeah. Makes sense. I don't have to sell anything to these people. They they they sell it to themselves once they've had discussions with people that are doing it already.

Dougie Blair [00:42:00]:
Yeah. It's sort of all materialised out of an early microgrid system that I developed for my own property when I first built it in 2013. When I built the property, it was one of the most energy efficient properties in Scotland. I didn't build it. And then I was told this is one of the most energy efficient properties in Scotland. It's got an EPC rating of a hundred and two, which is pretty unheard of. Easy to heed, but what they don't tell you about energy efficient properties is that they're really hard to keep cool in the summer.

Liz Allan  [00:42:35]:
Right.

Dougie Blair [00:42:35]:
And you end up you can't sleep at night. You need to fit aircon systems into properties

Liz Allan  [00:42:39]:
that are

Dougie Blair [00:42:40]:
well insulated. They don't tell you that. So we've learned the hard way. We've now got aircon, split aircon for heating and cooling, as well as underfloor heating.

Liz Allan  [00:42:47]:
Fair enough.

Dougie Blair [00:42:49]:
So we've had to use loads of split aircon to cool the place down, but anyway. And in the summer you've got copious spare power because your solar panels overproduce in the summer. So it doesn't matter that you've got split aircon cooling your living room and your bedroom down.

Liz Allan  [00:43:01]:
Because you've got it.

Dougie Blair [00:43:02]:
Because you've got the power to do it. Yeah. Costs you nothing to run it. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, if you get things right, yeah, if you get things right, your energy requirements are lower, which means that the scale of the microgrid required to provide the power for that consumption is much easier to solve.

Liz Allan  [00:43:19]:
No. This is brilliant. I would Yeah. I'd like to know because we talked before about something that I think we need to kinda highlight as well because there's so many things that I could talk to you about. So I probably have to get you on again. Can we talk about net metering? Because that was something that I'd never heard of and it works with what you're talking about with the micro grids and everything like that. But the UK as a whole doesn't provide or offer net metering, does it?

Dougie Blair [00:43:51]:
Right. There's a bit of history here. We'll go back a bit. Twenties 02/2006, '2 thousand '8, I ran a hydro business in Scotland. I won't go into too much detail but the hydro business in Scotland was small scale. 3.6 kilowatt hydro turbines which didn't sound much, but it's 3.6 kilowatts of continuous power for appropriate sites. Those appropriate sites were historically mill sites. So they had a mill race, water wheel, and their energy came from a water wheel.

Dougie Blair [00:44:20]:
Mechanical energy. So this turbine could be installed. They designed this small-scale turbine that could be installed in previous mills up and down the country. Of which there used to be 44,000 across the whole of the UK. So the turbine was designed. We started doing installs. And at the time, we were being paid double rocks renewable obligation certificates. 9.6 p a kilowatt they were worth.

Dougie Blair [00:44:46]:
So it was a good investment for an investor to get behind the project. And we did with a private investor behind the project. Won't go into too much detail. But it was to encourage people into renewables before anyone was interested in solar or wind or anything. That hadn't happened. VDentura hadn't happened. RHI hadn't happened by that point. It was a pioneering project launched in Scotland.

Dougie Blair [00:45:07]:
It was on the news. I get interviewed at the time. And it was really going places. We had to pull the plug on it, excuse the pun. But we had to pull the plug on it for various reasons to do with environment agencies and stuff like that. However Mm-mm. During the same time, I was looking at countries across Europe that had adopted net metering. Net metering was where effectively smart meters had been installed in these countries, which would tally what power you're buying from the grid and what power you were selling to the grid.

Dougie Blair [00:45:39]:
And a net metering contract or a net billing contract effectively subtracts what you've sold to the grid from what you buy from the grid, and your bill is the difference. Sounds logical to me, and I thought that would be great, encouraging the uptake of renewables. And I can see why it's been adopted in other countries. So I approached the Scottish executive at the time and said, why don't we have net metering in Scotland? And they said, we don't have the devolved powers to implement it. You'd have to go to Westminster. I got a group of people together. We went to Westminster. We lobbied for net metering at the time.

Dougie Blair [00:46:14]:
And we were told it was too complicated for VAT reasons. Right.

Dougie Blair [00:46:18]:
Okay. I thought, why would that be? It's 5% both ways if it's domestic and it's 20% both ways if it's in commercial. But anyway, they were just looking for an excuse. So we eventually gave up. But if you look at countries that have adopted net metering, they've adopted it in different ways in different countries. And the way net metering works as explained is, if you're a self producer of electricity and you produce more than you need in the summer, let's say it's from solar panels in the roof of your house. You're out at your work during the day, you've got four kilowatts of solar on your roof, it's going to spill onto the grid. The majority of that power is going to spill onto the grid, and some of it's going to be used in your fridge, because it's the only thing in the background that's going to be running, give or take. So that grid spillage effectively gets credited to you at the same rate as you're pulling power from the grid.

Dougie Blair [00:47:07]:
So if you're paying 26 p a kilowatt for power coming in from the grid, you get credited 26 p p for what goes out. Because technically what's happening to that power that goes out, it goes down your street to your neighbor and they pay 26p for it. Yeah. So somebody is getting 26 p for power that you've put into the grid for nothing. So why shouldn't it be you that gets it back? Because it's you that invested in the technology that created that free power that went onto the grid that was sold to your neighbor for 26 p. So net metering makes it fair in my opinion. And in the opinion of all the countries that have adopted it, which includes almost every country you can think of across the whole of Europe, The States, Australia, etcetera, they've all been net metering. We have always managed to avoid net metering in the UK for various political or other reasons.

Dougie Blair [00:47:59]:
Who knows? Bottom line is what net metering would allow, and I'm gonna touch on this. I won't go into detail because I'm working on something behind the scenes, which is quite interesting. But net metering would effectively allow peer-to-peer energy trading. Now peer to peer energy trading sounds extremely interesting. It would allow me, as a self producer of energy, to bank power on the grid that I can then use to charge my car halfway down the M6. Why should I not be able to use my power that I've invested in to charge my car no matter where my car is? Why does it have to be at my house? And why do I have to buy my own power back to charge my own car? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever in anyone's book. So if you think of the implications of being able to bank power, then I should be able to sell my excess power to you. So, Liz, you come home, you plug your car in, and it's not sunny where you are like today, but it's sunny here.

Dougie Blair [00:48:57]:
I've got excess power right now. I want to sell you my excess power. Today, I can't. Think of the implications of allowing peer-to-peer energy trading in the UK, which requires net metering to effectively unify the value of exported power and imported power. Which means it doesn't matter who consumes the power that went out at 26 b. It doesn't matter who consumes it. Somebody has been credited for it for someone else to consume it. So net metering would allow peer to peer energy trading, which would completely transform the uptake of electric vehicles in my opinion, and renewables in particular.

Dougie Blair [00:49:37]:
Who wouldn't want to bank summer overproduction of solar to run a heat pump to heat their house for nothing in the winter? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what net metering does. And you don't need a truckload of batteries to do it. You're using the grid as a battery and a lot of people say that the grid isn't a battery. Okay. When power goes on to the grid from 10,000 solar arrays from domestic properties, less power is being produced by gas, in real time, to operate the industry in the middle of that day.

Dougie Blair [00:50:12]:
So you've backed future use of gas by not having burnt it because you were getting all this power from tens of thousands of producers during the day. So you're not banking it. What you're doing is requiring less fossil fuel energy to produce the grid or to hold the grid up because a lot of that power has been spilled onto the grid during the day. Yeah. Yeah. And summer to winter, you'd bump a hell of a lot less gas in the summer months because people are not running their heat pumps in the summer. They're gonna run them in the winter. So what you've saved in not burning that gas in the summer months, in simple terms, gets burnt in the winter.

Dougie Blair [00:50:49]:
So you don't need a battery to do that. You're just shifting the timing of when existing fossil fuel related backup systems are operating in the summer months or in peak times during the day to then come in at times when you need the power elsewhere. The fact is the grid is investing in pumped storage, battery storage, rotational storage, and flywheels, etcetera. Gravitational storage. It's all happening anyway. So yes, there is some form of peer-to-peer energy trading, which would completely transform the energy industry at no expense to the public purse. The government could introduce net metering tomorrow, pave the way for peer to peer energy trading, and metering tomorrow, pave the way for peer to peer energy trading, and they wouldn't have to worry about the uptake of renewables or your source heat pumps. It would be a total no brainer to produce your own power, over produce in the summer, repurchase it in the winter when you need the heat to heat your property. And for driving electric vehicles, charge at home with your own power. And what you don't use of your power, you use it elsewhere. So that solves the problem of being able to consume power anywhere on the grid since we're all connected on a platform that relies on net metering to prop up peer to peer trading. So if anyone wants to do this, then come to me. I've got a team of people that know how to do this. We lack an open-minded investor.

Dougie Blair [00:52:18]:
That's the best way to put it. It just says, yep, I'm on board. I understand it. Given that we could do this today and create a platform that allows peer-to-peer energy trading in every other country apart from the UK. Mhmm. We could make a fortune everywhere else Mhmm. But here. And it's here that's got the problem.

Liz Allan  [00:52:36]:
I've just got a question. Just stepping back because I want to understand something. And this is kind of before, before the so this is more to talk with them, talk about net metering right at the beginning. So my in-laws and my nephew have both got their so my nephew inherited I bought a house with and he inherited the solar panels that were on the feed-in tariff. Yep. So both he and my in-laws as well, they put they put solar panels on very early and they benefit from the feed-in tariff. So they're getting paid for energy that they're exporting. We also get paid from our solar panels, but it's not the same as it's miles off them.

Liz Allan  [00:53:24]:
So, for somebody who is because they've said that their energy bills are kind of more or less zero. Is there a benefit for people who are on the feed-in tariff to get to go to net net get me to your feet here. Net metering as well.

Dougie Blair [00:53:39]:
Right. Feed and tariffs were set up, especially from a domestic perspective, which you just described. They were set up in quite a unique way to save on the metering costs. When you installed, which was almost invariably four kilowatts of solar, because that was the peak for feed-in tariff payments. It's four kilowatts of solar on a 3.6 kilowatt inverter, 16 amps per phase under what was called G83 grid connection permission at the time. It simplified the process to allow the mass deployment of roof-mounted domestic solar installs. Yeah. But in order to not require an export meter to be installed in every one of those premises, which would have been a nightmare, you just did a total generation tariff, which was installed by the installer of the PV system.

Dougie Blair [00:54:23]:
That total generation tariff gets read once a quarter by the homeowner, submitted to your energy supplier, and the energy supplier pays you feed in tariff plus what's called a deemed export. And the deemed export was deemed as 50% of everything you produced. So, if your meter that you're reading, which is a total generation meter, said that you produced a hundred kilowatt hours of power in a month. It was deemed that half of that spilled onto the grid. The reality is, it could have been a lot more and probably is a lot more. But to save having to actually get true metered figures and have the cost of extra metering and the hassle of extra metering, they they made it a deemed tariff. So anyone that's in receipt of feed and tariff today, still has a deemed export part of the total payment. Look at the feed and tariff, which ironically has nothing nothing to do with feeding into the grid.

Dougie Blair [00:55:16]:
It was a badly watered tariff. It's not a feed in tariff. It's a total generation tariff, but it happened to be called a feed in tariff. Right. And the reason it was to to prove it was badly wounded, if you were off grid and you installed solar under the feed in tariff, you still get paid feed in tariff. You had no grid connection. So clearly it couldn't feed into something. Yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:55:36]:
Because I know lots of installs. In fact, I did lots of installs on off-grid sites, which don't get the deemed export because there's no export because of no grid connection. But they still got feed-in tariff despite there not being a feed-in to the grid. It's a total generation tariff. So today, if you're in receipt of feed in tariff, you've got a total generation. Sorry. You've got a deemed export tariff included in that payment. What you can do is you can contact your energy supplier and split out the feed in tariff from your deemed export, then net metering would allow that export to credit you the full value

Liz Allan  [00:56:14]:
of Yeah. Makes sense. Fantastic.

Dougie Blair [00:56:17]:
So there you are.

Liz Allan  [00:56:18]:
Yeah. So I'm gonna ask you one final question.

Liz Allan  [00:56:22]:
Mhmm.

Liz Allan  [00:56:22]:
Because like I say, there's so much more that I could ask you and could talk to you about because you've done so much. If there was one policy change that you could make today to accelerate the renewable energy adoption in the UK, what would that be?

Dougie Blair [00:56:43]:
Allow peer-to-peer energy trading in the UK that doesn't involve sleeving.

Liz Allan  [00:56:48]:
And we won't talk about sleeving yet either. I'll get you on next time, another time.

Dougie Blair [00:56:53]:
Very briefly.

Dougie Blair [00:56:56]:
Very briefly. If I want to sell power from me to someone else, I have to rent the grid. If I have to rent the grid to get power to them, I have to use a third-party energy company as part of a three-way agreement for me to get my power to you. Peer to peer energy trading effectively turns electricity into what used to be called a BitTorrent. If you know any of the BitTorrents, Yeah.

Liz Allan  [00:57:22]:
I've heard of BitTorrents. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dougie Blair [00:57:24]:
Well, if you imagine energy was a bit torrent. If you need imagine energy was a bit torrent. If you need 10 kilowatts of power today, you don't need to get 10 kilowatts from one supplier. You could have a hundred domestic properties, each doing a tiny bit of power, all selling you their bit of your requirement, it becomes a bit of energy. Now bit energy, peer to peer trading would transform this market. And all it needs is a legislative change that allows peer-to-peer energy trading without having to be behind the meter. Any watching this who wants to do this, then absolutely get in touch. I've been thinking of this for since I first got into this industry twenty-five years ago, this is all I've been thinking about, how do you fix this energy market? It's completely broken.

Dougie Blair [00:58:08]:
Our energy market is completely broken. But it could be fixed with a very, very few and very subtle changes to the way that energy is allowed to be traded. It would control the big six, which couldn't happen soon enough in my opinion. And it would allow proper self generators of power to properly invest in renewables, and it doesn't involve a penny of public money. And it would transform the uptake of heat pumps, transform the uptake of electric vehicles and renewables. Suppose we've got a genuine net zero strategy. In that case, we can do it without investing a single penny of public money just by subtly changing a couple of rules that allow either net metering or peer-to-peer energy trading. You don't need both. You can do it one or the other.

Liz Allan  [00:58:55]:
Dougie, you've been an absolute star. I'm gonna say thank you. Thank you. It's been amazing I'm sure everybody who's been watching and listening has really, really appreciated, and you know what you've said so please do get hold of Dougie if you know.

Dougie Blair [00:59:14]:
if you want your brain fried

Liz Allan  [00:59:15]:
Yeah well no. No. I'm honestly it's brilliant. I'm gonna put all of your links, everything in the show notes so you'll have it, everybody watching, listening to this will have that. I want to just say to you, and I say this every time, now please don't forget to tell people about the podcast. Like, subscribe, share it, comment on our socials, you know, subscribe to YouTube and the like, and your favourite podcasting platform because we need people to hear what Dougie's got to say. So on that note, Dougie, thank you ever so much for your time. It's been fantastic.

Liz Allan  [00:59:54]:
And to everybody else, I'm gonna say thank you for watching and listening, and I'll see you later. Bye

Dougie Blair [00:59:59]:
Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.