Transmission

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://modoenergy.com/research/en/scotland-wind-generation-curtailment-gas-plants-grid-constraints-battery-energy-storage-explainer-documentary?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=podcast&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.

Most BESS revenue forecasts aren't wrong, they're just being used for the wrong thing. The gap between a valuation-grade forecast and what a project actually earns in a live market is where BESS developers win or lose. The developers who survive that gap are the ones who design for uncertainty from the start - not after the fact.
Recorded live at the Investing in Battery Energy Storage conference, Paul Mason, Chief Investment Officer of Harmony Energy, joins Ed Porter for a return appearance on Transmission.
They cover:
- Why treating a revenue forecast as a fixed cash flow is the most common mistake in BESS development.
- How the listed fund model enabled GB BESS to scale.
- Why splitting BESS revenues into ancillary, wholesale, and balancing mechanism streams is now a misleading framework.
- How Harmony selects new markets in France and Germany: renewable penetration, grid-first site selection, and why any business case dependent on high ancillary revenues is a losing strategy.
- What good optimizer relationships actually look like.
Got follow-up questions? Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst : https://modoenergy.com/sign-up?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=paul_mason
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/a2--s956k-c
⏱ CHAPTERS
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0:00 Introduction
1:16 What do BESS developers get wrong when building an IPP?
3:25 Why full EPC contracts — and why they still hired project managers
5:28 Duration strategy: the case for 2-hour batteries early
7:00 The full BESS lifecycle — develop, build, operate, sell
8:25 How Harmony raised capital through listed funds (and why it worked then)
10:45 Why listed fund capital flowed out and what came next
13:20 The Foresight asset sale: private vs. public valuation
15:08 New markets: what Harmony looks for in France, Germany and beyond
18:05 Market timing — should you enter early or wait for wholesale dynamics?
20:12 Grid connection across Europe: where it works and where it doesn't
22:33 Operating a live fleet: what drives performance once assets are running
24:10 How to work with optimizers without burning the relationship
26:30 BM trading trials with Tesla — what the data showed
28:45 Is GB still exciting for Harmony, or is it old hat?
30:20 Audience Q&A: colocation, revenue cannibalization, and market saturation
32:35 If you ran European power: one thing to fix
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Transmission is hosted by Ed Porter, Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy.
New episodes every week.

Battery storage in Africa is one of the most misunderstood opportunities in global energy. Only 8% of the continent’s hydro power has been tapped. In Malawi, just 14% of the population is connected to the grid. Africa needs to add an estimated 100 GW of capacity in the next decade and the fastest way is with renewables and storage. Michael Cupit develops BESS projects in Malawi and Kenya, and he’s spent years working inside the gap between how these markets look from the outside and how they actually operate on the ground.
In this episode of Transmission, Ed Porter sits down with Michael to break down the real risk picture in Sub-Saharan Africa: why mid-to-high-teen IRRs are the reality, how 20-year capacity payment contracts compare to merchant BESS in Europe, and what it actually takes to get a project from bare earth to operational - a journey that took eight years in Malawi.
They cover:
The two biggest misconceptions about doing business in Africa
How South Africa, Malawi, and Kenya's grids differ and where batteries fit in each
The role of DFIs, MIGA guarantees, and multilateral risk wrappers in making projects bankable
China's declining role in African infrastructure and what's replacing it
The O&M challenge: building operational capability from scratch in frontier markets
Why winning the argument for renewables means making the commercial case - not just the climate one
Want to track battery storage capacity and market trends across Africa 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=michael_cupit
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@modoenergy
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⏱ CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction
1:08 The two biggest misconceptions about Africa
4:30 IRRs, risk and contracted vs merchant returns
8:00 Why Africa is skipping the fossil fuel grid model
9:40 South Africa: load shedding, rooftop solar and grid constraints
13:00 Battery use cases: the transmission line problem
17:00 Malawi's grid: run-of-river hydro and the diesel spread
19:00 Kenya: geothermal, 10 GW buildout and hyperscaler demand
22:30 Rare earth mining and the electrification push in Malawi
26:30 Financing: DFIs, MIGA, project finance and currency risk
31:45 How long does it really take? The 8-year development journey
33:10 China's role in African infrastructure - myth vs reality
33:45 Engineering talent, local capacity and the O&M challenge
36:55 What success looks like in 5 years
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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.