Transmission

Developing battery storage in emerging markets isn't a technology problem - it's a regulatory, offtake, and capital problem. The frameworks, offtake structures, and capital mandates weren't built for storage and that gap is exactly where the risk sits.
Hassen Bali, co-founder and director at Ion Ventures, joins Ed Porter to discuss what it actually takes to develop battery storage projects across markets at very different stages of maturity, from the UK to Southeast Asia.
They cover:
- Why battery storage development demands a different approach to solar or wind and why you have to decide your commercial endpoint before you break ground, not after.
- How project conversion rates in the UK BESS market have dropped from 30–40% in the early days to roughly 10–15% today, and how that affects pipeline management and investor communications.
- Why early-stage BESS markets like Malaysia and the Philippines are still reliant on bilateral offtake and what that means for project bankability.
- Why FCA-regulated investors face hard legal barriers to project finance in sub-investment-grade countries and what that means for who can actually back early-stage BESS projects.
- Hassen's contrarian view: that reform of merit order and legacy thermal contracts is the most direct lever for accelerating energy transition globally even if it means unwinding agreements that investors consider bulletproof.
Want to model BESS revenue across different market structures? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, is built for exactly these questions. Want to model BESS revenue across different market structures? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, is built for exactly these questions. Free sign up here.
Transcript available here:
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:53 What People Get Wrong About Developing Battery Storage Projects
2:41 BESS Project Development Pipeline: How to Manage Investors and Conversion Rates
5:58 Why Ion Ventures Expanded Into Southeast Asia
7:34 BESS Market Readiness in Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei
8:32 Replacing Coal and Diesel: What Southeast Asian Grids Look Like Today
11:35 BESS Project Success Rates in Emerging Markets vs the UK
12:39 Why Bilateral Offtake Models Dominate Early-Stage BESS Markets
15:17 Why Long-Term Contracts Can Actually Help Battery Storage Bankability
16:05 Why Country Risk and OECD Classification Block Capital From Emerging BESS Markets
21:02 Can Emerging Markets Leapfrog to Grid 2.0? The Telco Analogy Explained
22:59 How to Build a Battery Storage Roadmap for a Nascent Grid: Lessons from Bangladesh
30:06 How to Avoid Grid Congestion When Scaling Renewables in Emerging Markets
32:17 Contrarian View: Should Merit Order Reform Unwind Legacy Thermal Contracts?
You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production. Your host is Ed Porter - Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.

Spain has approximately 42GW of utility-scale solar and 50GW when rooftop is included, yet less than 100MW of grid-connected battery storage. In February, solar capture rates hit €1.30 per megawatt hour, a fraction of the €30–35/MWh needed for a solar project to break even. So why hasn't battery storage followed the solar boom and could it be the key to rescuing solar revenues?
Pablo Martinez Serrano, Iberia Industry Lead at Modo Energy, joins Ed Porter to break down why Spain's energy market defies easy assumptions, and what the Iberian blackout changed.
They cover:
- Why Spain's hydro fleet masked the need for batteries for years, and why that's no longer enough as solar saturation bites.
- Why solar developers are earning less and less for every unit of power they generate and what that means for the projects still in the pipeline.
- The co-location thesis: why existing solar asset owners are turning to BESS to fix their generation profile and unlock ancillary service revenue
- What actually caused the Iberian blackout: voltage instability, cascading disconnections, and why the TSO had already flagged the risk
- Spain's new voltage control market: how it works, why priority of dispatch may be more valuable than the reactive service payment itself
Want to model battery revenue stacks in Spain or track Iberian power market dynamics? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, is built for exactly these questions. Free sign up: https://help.modo.energy/en/articles/13335470-ko-your-ai-analyst?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast_apps&utm_id=pablo_martinez
⏱ CHAPTERS
00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:50 What everyone gets wrong about Spain
00:01:54 Spain's generation mix: solar, wind, hydro, gas and nuclear
00:04:43 Seasonal demand dynamics and why spring is the problem
00:06:03 Solar capture price collapse: €42 to below €30/MWh
00:08:19 PPA contracts, negative prices and the solar momentum problem
00:11:52 The co-location pivot: why developers are turning to storage
00:13:58 Why Spain has less than 100MW of batteries vs GB's 6GW
00:15:33 Where the money is coming from: two types of investor
00:17:11 The Iberian blackout: what went wrong and why
00:20:04 How Spain is rebuilding grid stability after the blackout
00:21:04 Spain's new voltage control market and what it pays
00:24:43 Grid forming inverters and the future of ancillary services
00:26:38 Contrarian take: Spain hasn't actually decoupled from gas
00:29:15 The three phases of displacing thermal generators
00:30:39 Closing remarks
You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production. Your host is Ed Porter - Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.

Smart EV charging isn't just about saving money on your electricity bill, it's quietly becoming one of the most scalable sources of grid flexibility in Great Britain.
Ohme has run the numbers: incentivising 22,000 customers to plug in more often drove a 32–37% increase in plug-in frequency, unlocking dispatchable flexibility across 60 National Grid events.
In this episode, Ed is joined by Joshua Willetts and Dan Norton from Ohme. Josh is part of Ohme's customer operations team and starts the conversation with a live demo of the Ohme Home Pro, and then Dan Ohme's Commercial Director takes us through a deep dive of the economics, regulation, and long-term potential of smart home charging.
They cover:
- How the Ohme Home Pro works, tethered setup, app pairing, tariff integration, and smart scheduling on Octopus Go and equivalent time-of-use tariffs.
- Why plugging in little and often (rather than running to empty and topping up) is the behavioural shift that unlocks real-world EV flexibility.
- The CrowdFlex trial results: how a 1–3 GBP/week incentive delivered a 32–37% rise in plug-in frequency and fed directly into National Grid dispatch events
- What smart charging regulation, including the Energy Smart Appliance (ESA) framework and load control licensing means for charger manufacturers and aggregators
- How V2G and vehicle-to-home could evolve once older EV fleets start cycling into second-hand markets, and what cultural shifts are needed first
Want to model EV flexibility potential in your market? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, is built for exactly these questions. Free sign up: https://help.modo.energy/en/articles/13335470-ko-your-ai-analyst?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=video&utm_id=ohme
Transcript available here: https://modoenergy.com/transmission-podcast/d2135750-c32a-49dd-a218-e3f69cfc48d7
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⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro — Ed Porter, Welcome to Transmission
1:04 Meet Joshua & the Ohme Home Pro
1:52 App Setup, QR Code Pairing & Smart Scheduling
4:44 Why a Box? What's Inside an EV Smart Charger
5:22 Live Demo: Charging a Light Bulb via the Ohme App
7:53 Charge Speed, Battery Times & Little-and-Often Strategy
11:37 Introducing Dan: EV Adoption Stats & the UK Home Charge Market
13:33 Barriers to Home EV Charging Installation
18:44 Home Charging vs. Public Charging: The Economics
20:06 CrowdFlex Explained: Smart Charging as Grid Flexibility
23:11 CrowdFlex Results.
26:32 Smart Charging Regulation: ESA, Load Control & Revenue Certainty
28:43 How Big Could EV Flexibility Get? GB Grid Scale
30:34 Vehicle to Grid (V2G) & Vehicle to Home: What's Coming
34:40 What Would You Change? Flexibility Contracts as Steel in the Ground
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You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production. Your host is Ed Porter — Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.

Battery storage looks simple - a steel box that charges when prices are low and discharges when they're high. But financing a BESS project in Europe means underwriting a trading position: convex revenues, volatile returns, and a growing menu of contractual choices that each shift the risk profile in a different direction.
Lisa McDermott, Managing Director and Head of Energy Transition Project Financing at ABN AMRO, has been structuring BESS deals across Europe since 2023*. In this episode, she opens up the credit committee. What gets a project over the line, and what quietly stops it.
Covered:
- Why battery storage finance is fundamentally different from solar or wind and why contracting it away doesn't change the underlying risk when the contract ends.
- From physical tolls to day-ahead swaps, Lisa breaks down which offtake structures are gaining traction in Europe and why the day-ahead swap is the hardest to bank.
- Too much merchant exposure, insufficient sponsor equity, weak technical track record and why pushing too many levers at once is the fastest way to stop a deal.
- How battery warranties have evolved from 8 to 20 years and why coverage beyond the debt tenor is a bankability requirement, not a nice-to-have.
- Germany's grid fee reform has created financing uncertainty at COD, while the Netherlands' congestion model is, counter-intuitively, better for bankability.
Want to model battery revenue stacks or stress-test tolling structures for a specific market? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, is built for exactly these questions. Free sign up: https://help.modo.energy/en/articles/13335470-ko-your-ai-analyst?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=lisa_mcdermott
Transcript available here: https://modoenergy.com/transmission-podcast/e2b12f17-f7b4-49d3-9d85-e4cc822695f6
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⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction - Is financing battery storage the same as financing solar?
2:32 Why a battery is financing a trader, not an infrastructure asset
5:14 Financing across technology types - TRL 8 vs TRL 9
10:43 What stops a BESS deal in credit committee
15:53 Comfort zone: from fully merchant to fully contracted
18:43 The growing offtake menu, physical tolls, virtual tolls, and floors
24:43 Day-ahead swaps explained and why they introduce basis risk
31:59 Gearing: the sliding scale from 30% merchant to 85% fully tolled
34:37 European market comparison: Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany
40:23 Final question
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You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production. Your host is Ed Porter — Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.
*Correction: The intro incorrectly states that Lisa McDermott has been financing batteries since 2020. She has been doing so since 2023. We apologise for the error.

The battery storage gold rush is over in most major markets. What's replaced it is more complex, more competitive, and if you're not careful with your contracts - potentially more exposed than the merchant era ever was. It is often thought that offtake deals like tolls de-risk a battery project, but that might be one of the biggest misconceptions in BESS right now.
The market is maturing fast, but the players who thrive won't be the ones who got in first - they'll be the ones who understood the complexity earliest.
Sam Harden is Global Director at Enfinity Global, joins Ed to challenge conventional thinking on BESS contracts, market maturity, and what it actually takes to build and operate storage assets at scale.
They cover:
- Why BESS tolls redistribute risk rather than remove it and how availability penalties can cost you more than lost merchant revenue.
- The MACSE auction in Italy: what 15-year fixed-revenue contracts mean for asset owners, and why the incumbent utility won the majority of the first round.
- Whether the battery storage gold rush is truly over and why the market is maturing into an asset class, not saturating.
- How Enfinity Global is futureproofing project design for duration augmentation, grid-forming inverters, and services like inertia and voltage control.
- Why the biggest bottleneck to Europe's 50GW battery buildout isn't technology or capital - it's qualified people.
Want to track BESS revenues, tolling structures, and market dynamics across Europe and beyond? Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst, is built for exactly these questions. Free sign up: https://modoenergy.com/sign-up?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=sam_harden
Transcript available here: https://modoenergy.com/transmission-podcast/3f4cebb7-8b40-4ffb-80dd-717002c5747d
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⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction
0:50 Are tolls a silver bullet for BESS risk management?
5:15 Italy's MACSE auction explained
6:05 Is the battery gold rush over?
10:30 From scarcity trade to operational excellence
13:00 Battery storage as a maturing asset class — good or bad?
16:40 How to develop BESS sites for the future
19:38 Battery augmentation and energy density gains
21:28 Will the battery sector consolidate?
25:13 How to position for above-infrastructure returns
26:25 Operational risk: what spreadsheets can't capture
28:00 Warranties vs. real-world asset management
30:13 Supply chain and talent: the hidden bottleneck
33:12 One change to accelerate European battery rollout
34:49 Wrap-up
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You can watch or listen to new episodes every Tuesday. Transmission is a Modo Energy production.
Your host is Ed Porter - Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.