 There has been a delay in starting the event for which, of course, we have to apologize, but I'm afraid it arises from the vagaries of air transport, which we've heard a lot about this year. I don't know what the exact issue is today, but our distinguished guest speaker keynote speaker, Laura Sands, unfortunately has been delayed. She is in the car on the way from the airport, so we expect her to arrive soon, depending on what the traffic is like between here and the airport. She is in that car, so she will be here in, we hope, a matter, a short matter of minutes. This is an amazing building and we are so grateful to the ESB for having us here today, as it were, and to mark that, and to say a few words at the outset. I'm going to invite Geraldine Heavey, who is Executive Director of Enterprise Services with the ESB, just to address you briefly, Geraldine. Good afternoon, everybody. And on behalf of ESB, I'm delighted to welcome you all here for the first hybrid lecture in this year's Rethink Energy Series in association with the IIEA. And for those of you in person here today, you are very welcome to. It's William 27 ESB's head office. This Rethink Energy Series brings experts and party leaders from around the world to share their insights and analysis with us on the future of energy. And today I am delighted shortly to welcome two of its William 27, our distinguished speaker, Laura Sands, CBE, who brings an absolute wealth of experience and a really interesting perspective to this subject. And I know Laura's speech today will touch on critical parts of the energy transition, in particular the significant role of digitalization, and the importance of placing the customer at the center as we move forward. And from my own brief in ESB, I can see firsthand the transformational shifts and opportunities that come from digitalization, and we are only at the start of that journey. By leveraging data and digital technologies, we have an opportunity to completely transform the electricity sector and accelerate the transition to net zero energy. In fact, ESB's driven to make a different strategy calls out digital and data as one of just the four foundational capabilities in the delivery of our net zero by 2040 strategy. In our business we are leveraging digital and data solutions to enhance system efficiency and resilience, improve customer experiences and enable people to work smarter. Our use of AI in ensuring the quality of the rollout of the national smart measuring program is a great example of this. With the development of new digitally enabled technologies including smart meters electric vehicles and network sensors. To minimize there is a massive opportunity to unlock flexibility and enable customers to engage more actively in the connected energy system of the future. In Ireland customers with smart meters already have the technology to switch to smart tariffs and take greater control over their energy use. And the most active customers are combining a range of technologies, such as solar panels EVs and smart meters to minimize their energy costs and reduce emissions. We have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of what is possible. Last winter ESB networks introduced their beat the peak pilot, encouraging customers to amend their consumption to help reduce electricity demand at peak times. Thousands of customers signed up to receive energy saving tips and alerts, and the insights from this pilot will be used going forward to refine and develop our approach to active demand side management. The energy crisis has increased people's awareness of their energy consumption, and we see more and more customers embracing new technologies and actively managing their energy use. Not all customers will have the ability nor the desire to adopt these new technologies, unless it's extremely simple or compelling for them to do so. Another challenge here in ESB and indeed for the wider energy sector is to help customers access the benefits of these new technologies by developing products and services that are intuitive and add real value to people's lives. For example, Electric Ireland's Home Electric Plus product provides advanced insights to customers on their actual home usage device, device usage. To sum up, I'd say this is a very exciting time for our sector. It is critical that we leverage the ever-growing power of digital and data to partner with our customers in the transition to zero carbon energy. I really am looking forward to hearing from Laura this afternoon. And now I'll hand you back to the chair of today's events. So back to you, Alice. Thank you everyone. So you're all thinking what's he going to do now. I mean, at Jirling has made the point about the enormous, you know, IT input and the reason this entire agenda and ESB really has been a trailblazer in relation to that as she has touched on. And what I was going to ask just for a few minutes in the short, we hope few minutes that will be before our guest speaker arrives is to ask Mario Connor, who is the chief information officer in the ESB, just to maybe elaborate on some of those points, perhaps not for too long. We'll operate on the basis of when we see our guest arriving that we will, we will, I worked in radio years ago, so I'm not going to give you any of these signals or anything like that, but we'll work it out between us because our guest speaker arrived and obviously want to make time. But we're delighted that thank you for stepping into the breach, but also it's an important matter in any event. So we're delighted just to hear the elaboration on some of the points that Jirling has touched on. Nothing like working at ESB every day is a surprise. Okay, so digitalization at ESB. This is the placement of our writer future strategy, and it's a really exciting strategy with decarbonization right at the heart of it. And you can see our corporates up there, and our three strategic objectives of decarbonized electricity, resilient infrastructure and empowered customers. But at the next level down you can see our for enabling capabilities are foundational capabilities of people, financials, ESG, and for the first time ever featuring in our corporate strategy, digital and data, and really leveraging it to transform ESB to a data driven utility, with our values underpinning everything in how we do that. And we have a vision we set our vision for digitalization at ESB that through data and technology we will deliver real value to our customers and lead decarbonization by radically adapting our businesses and transforming our employees experience. And we have a framework that you know is overarching and kind of pulls it all together and right the center of that is the customer and customers experience. And how do we drive out the best possible customer experience for our customers. We do it by driving out the best possible employee experience for for all our people. That is enabled in turn by modernizing our business, our business models, how we operate how we manage our assets, and how we work in a day to day basis. And then that in turn is enabled through data and technology. And behind all of those, there's a significant amount of detail and in terms of, you know what we're focusing on. I mean the two, the slides of my own laptop here so forgive me if I'm a little bit disjointed and bear with me. So an awful lot to focus on it under all of those. And in the meantime, there's a fundamental shift happening in industry in how how organizations are run and how they operate. And that shift is going from siloed businesses and business units to value driven hybrid teams working collaboratively from being process led to being experience led with the customer at the heart from thick scope and timeline to iterative products evolving based on value. And from tracking project milestones to focusing on tracking value and delivering a step change and business outcomes. And all of that really is going from waterfall to agile. So we're very much on this journey at ESB. But can you imagine for a utility founded in 1927. And what could be seen as a traditional electricity utility, driving out digitalization different ways of working and focusing on different things. It's a massive challenge. And that is why we have defined an operating model to do this that takes us from our very high level vision and unconstrained thinking very much focusing on people experience customer experience and being data driven. Then are identifying the opportunities to deliver that vision and prioritizing all based on value, but with experience at the heart of it and marrying those experiences that are necessary for our customer and our employees with the underlying processes. Putting top down funding in place and targeting value. And then from there we've identified a roadmap of opportunities across large scale delivery pillars. And we're doing this with with all our businesses across ESB with with with ESB networks with generation and trading with customer solutions, and indeed our enterprise services and also our engineering and major projects business, going from very high level on constrained thinking visionary thinking of what the future needs to look like to enable decarbonization, right through to the hard work of delivery of that of that vision. The operating model consists of five steps from that very high level strategic alignment. Next to the strategic design of what that future looks like, shape and prioritization in terms of what are the opportunities what are the products and solutions to be delivered, planning those solutions in detail, taking into account things like cyber requirements and stuff like that. And then it's just one little row there, but the hard hard work of delivering. We've set out a number of transform transformation deliverables to her key this thinking and coming together that's required at a very early stage in order to deliver the right products at the end of the day. And the most when you think about digitalization and it in a traditional sense, you wouldn't think of a lot of these things like culture transformation and principles value targets reference architecture division the north star. So these things wouldn't traditionally have come into, let's say it, but they're very much required for digitalization, because with digitalization, you're changing how an organization operates, even how, how a number of an organization things what the mindsets are, and how people collaborate how they work together. And so it's, it's very much nearly an all of organization approach. In doing all that we've had some achievements along the way. And data and becoming a data driven organization has we've made great strides here. It's improving decision making understanding and managing our business performance and analyzing and solving business problems using data. And here there's a collection of dashboards and, you know, bringing together information at all levels of the organization with that ability to drill down. And that's becoming let's say business as usual now in all parts of of ESP. Here are a few examples of some of the digital products and very much increasing these types of products power check you may all have engaged with that at times of storm, where it helps us helps the customer and get the latest information on outages that we're collecting them. And Jeremy mentioned smart measuring and in ESP networks we've new connections online now with over 90% since I'm sure somebody knows more about it we correct me if I have the figure wrong. But I think over 90% of new connections with ESP networks are now all digital online. There are various examples there, and things like guided buying in our enterprise services and community engagement to app and generation and trading. So spending all our businesses and spending customer experience and employee experience, as well as how we operate and manage assets. So the AI is playing more and more of a feature here. I think we've over 20 AI use cases rolled out now, and our current and immediate crusade is learning more and more about gen AI and identifying the use cases across ESP, where we really think and see the gen AI has significant potential to play. We are the first and maybe the only Irish organization to take part in the Microsoft early adopter program for Microsoft co pilot, and we're very excited at the moment planning that with our businesses. On the left of this slide is a depiction of the AI use case to German mentioned, whereby we used Microsoft cognitive services to judge the quality of the meter installations in the network smart measuring program where the technician takes a photograph of the meter and the technician uploads it and it's compared with a whole bank of good quality and meter installations and judges the quality of the meter installation on that basis. But other AI use cases as well and in sentiment analysis and contact analysis and various other other examples. And had received at least our teams have received external recognition, and we have, we've been looking enough to receive a number of awards, some global awards and some national awards for the work that our teams have done. And across ESP, and that really is an accolade and it's a nice escalate to have for our people who, you know, put the hard work in day in day out. It's also lovely to see that our wonderful people are winning awards as well, like our analytics team, and future leader of the year and data leader of the year in that team as well. So, not important in one way but very important in another way. And that then we recognize that this will be possible unless we uplift the capability of all our people across all our teams. Sometimes people can think this is a matter for the IT and digital teams only, but technology and data and digital is all pervasive now. It's a very irrelevant challenge for all teams and all parts of the business. And we see this as two sides of the same coin, accelerating digital capability, and also the culture of the mindset, the ways of working. And so we are executing the capability program across the entirety of ESP to uplift that digital capability, but not only the capability, the confidence, the confidence to use the tools in a very effective way across the technical teams, as well as the the back office teams. And in so doing, changing our culture to a very highly collaborative way of working, bringing different expertise together, for example, converging IT with operational technology and so on. And I think that might be a nice segue to the main event. So thank you very much. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Mary. That was that was terrific. And thanks for stepping in to elaborate on those points for us. We're delighted. I'm going to do the introduction, even as our guest speaker joins us and don't even have an opportunity. I'm very convinced with the opportunity that I would otherwise have to say hello and shake hands so I'll do that afterwards, but we're delighted to be joined today by former conservative MP and chair of the UK government's energy digitalization task force Laura Laura's very professional experience includes time spent in journalism, public relations and advocacy, but obviously very well known as for her service as a member of parliament in the south time of constituency between 2010 and 2015. There's a lot of stuff written down here about Laura that I could tell you, but I'm going to just cut that if that's all right, we can come back to it afterwards. And she has a huge amount of offer on the agenda that we're interested in. I'm going to dispense to any further introductions I know she won't mind that. And you can check her out on LinkedIn anyway and all over the place so delighted to welcome straight to the podium from the airport, not her fault that she was delayed. You're so welcome. Laura sounds. Thank you all so much and many apologies for a plane two hours sitting at Gatwick and but just wonderful to be here in Dublin so thank you very much. And thank you to Mary, who was the star of the show so I'm nearly here as the follow up. And it's lovely to see John we work together on the Northern Irish advisory group for that for their energy strategy. Thank you all very much. And so I think I have been asked to do a little tour of what possibly what I think probably the energy sector is going to look like in the future. As a recovering politician I am, I have just about re entered the human race. When I left politics I decided instead of being one of these sort of broad political people I become a plumber. Ultimately, it's the plumbing of the energy system and how we look at it that really needs to change. Not that I'm very good when the system goes wrong or the boiler but when it comes to energy I have a few contestable ideas and I hope that you will contest them. I've done quite a lot of work with Imperial College with lots of other collaborators and ESP was one of the funders of one of my reports on regulation. But this was really this report that we did and it will be this is a bit of a synthesis was about the recosting how we've got to look at this system quite differently and how the system changes are going to absolutely affect us to have different business models and so ESP this is an interesting proposition possibly from your perspective, but also digitalization and modernization. Now you can start throwing tomatoes at this particular moment but you know something the energy sector, pretty old fashioned, not quite there, you know, at the forefront of how the system works. So here we are, this is a politician sitting here Dr do little looking at the past and looking at the future we've got in the past, big is beautiful. This is great thing by Ari Sargent designed and built by engineers, bastardized by economists and marketers, the power industry continues to deliver one of the most successful consumer confusion programs of all time. He doesn't want me to say anymore, and he is an energy supplier in New Zealand so there you get he does know our biggest beautiful we've got blind man's bluff. We have, you know, an energy system operator in the UK. They think they know what the system looks like and then suddenly the lights went out in 2019, and suddenly we find out they didn't know what the assets were on the system. So big is beautiful we're moving to a very new world, and it's a really difficult psychological change. I have to have something Monty Python on it. Blessed of the cheese makers, because actually what we're talking about now is distributed system design, much, much more. Many more capital assets rather than commodities transportation you're in the network business other people are in transmission. The networks cost is going to start to become a very, very different thing. So what does this really mean is, we have got a new cost, a new value, and a new price for energy going forward. So, we currently live in a world of the commodity, wonderful electron, but actually the commodity is going to go down in value. The capital costs that again have to stick everywhere within the system in your driveway on your roof in the IRC on your transmission. The capital is what is going to be the core cost of the system, and not a zero marginal cost of of an electron, but a much, much lower one. And just think about this 1990 a terabyte of data was a million dollars. Today, it's five cents. Now I'm not saying the electrons going to go there, but we have got this very, very different system very capital intensive. If we look at the consumer side, the consumer is going to have to access these assets. And so what are we going to have to do. They're never going to be able to do that off the back of a commodity. We're going to have to look at financial service products, we're going to have to look at different business propositions. There is a great thing that's going on in Spain at the moment which is an even in the villages. This company is actually saying to the, to everybody they've all got solar right that to everybody electricity is going to cost you absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. What you will have to do is buy a subscription to our storage capacity. So we become a very, very similar to cloud storage. That's also where we're going to get different business models that are going to be weirdly, although I know centralized and big as beautiful people don't believe this, but actually the more distributed system we have potentially, and I think in reality is more resilient. Weirdly, if we set it up properly. But where is the value and the value doesn't sit in those silos the value sits in the optimization which is the middle. So that is, well, in many ways the sector has not been always able to pick up. It hasn't been the most digitally savvy it hasn't been the most aggressive when it comes to new technologies, but demand and supply will become equal, equal value, not real, but value within the system. So how can we pick that up. Now I used to show this to Ofgem our regulator, and Ofgem was in the middle, looking very confused, and they all got a little bit upset about this, but this is the new, in many ways paradigm of if you're running an energy system, whether you're a regulator, whether you're a large company is how are you going to manage all these different variants. And it's a very new set of requirements for the energy sector. And we've got a lot of different dynamics all being shown here. But in the UK, we have 400 people who run the energy sector. And weird, they all know each other golf handicap. And they are moving to 100 million actions and assets on the system. Every EV car can do three things, export, import and store. If you think that the number of EVs on the system by 2035 are energy system operators says will be the equivalent of three nuclear power stations. We have got a very different system, and either we can ignore the 100 million and have to build absolutely extortionate amount of infrastructure, or we have to bring it into the system. So what have we got, we've got a new system where whether I find it fascinating. I know everybody in energy needs to understand the weather. But you know what's fascinating is, it doesn't take price signals, it doesn't follow legislation. It's got no we have no agency over whether we have a lot more agency over demand. And if we do it sensibly, capital is king blending assets. So I've come back to my cheese makers. There are a lot of people in the energy sector who are commodity makers and I would call them milk farmers. And I'm sure it's the same in Ireland, but certainly the same in the UK, milk farmers get screwed. They get absolutely pushed right to the edge. If you're a cheese maker, you start to add value. And how do we create blended products and assets balancing costs are absolutely rocketing, rocketing, and to be frank, between balancing costs constraints, etc. And if the UK consumer really knew that, I think we would have a lot more problems, but our ESO says by six by 2035 60% will be done by demand. That is a massive increase distributed asset values, as I said, EV cars, and value of demand will be the new creator. You could say that there is a new competitive pressure between those who deliver optimized demand, and those who are looking at optimized supply, and where that tension lies. So the risks and opportunities, we've got the big stuff or you will know about the big stuff. We've got the clever stuff which I think the energy sector is embarking on and starting and I'm sure Mary told you have brilliantly ESB is doing this space, etc. The new things is really the small. So how do we create distributed asset models. The difficult which is my old life which I refuse to now talk about so that's something that your public affairs people and all of that will have to deal with but planning being absolutely the most delightful challenge I think for everybody. Then there is the different and the different is customers, different forms of fuel biodiversity and communications and I don't know whether Mary talked about this, but if we are to have a digitalized system communications systems are going to have to be co-planned. I have to be as resilient as the energy system and I'll come on to a little example of that where things could have gone a bit pear shaped. And these are the three drivers of change new market player. That is demand. Suddenly this customer who's been pretty. It's the same in in our in the UK we have divided 60 million people into six archetypes right Amazon divides the UK into 150,000 different archetypes. So do we really think that six is is going to be adequate do we really understand our customer and do we really understand what our customer is prepared to do and how we should serve that. The second is about digitalization fundamentally but it's about different business models blending results optimization. And the third, which is probably one of the most important and I only skip on this at the end but I do, you know you've got fabulous talents in Ireland, but just start to think beyond the energy sector for that talent because that is what we're going to need when you're needing logistics people all sorts of different talents that need to come in to deliver a very different system. So I'm going to just start start with demand. So I believe and I'd love to hear other view but anyway I would believe that going forward demand is equal to supply. Even the physics tells us that markets should be designed around it, but currently actually the demand is seen as sort of a little bit the victim, the energy sector is like a hose pipe and it just sort of comes and sprays you with energy. And there isn't really that that thing. The, these are the costs that 10% under 10% in the UK went to demand side assets in out of the so called the UK government funding. We did some metrics and I won't go into this in too much detail, but if you want to look at these metrics. This is apparently, I've been told the first time ever has ever been done, and that is, we have compared demand and supply assets, according to whole system costs, not according to the levelized cost of electricity, but as these other costs such as networks, balancing costs, etc come up if you look at the whole system costs. Then, and you start to compare demand and supply. What do you get every time you put demand asset on the system, you lower whole system costs. It's really, really interesting. And that is something that I'm working with World Economic Forum with the base modeling team of departments modeling team did this with me in frontier economics. And we're trying to get the treasury to start to understand that these demand assets actually lower whole system costs. It's designed around customers now it's quite interesting because again, and again you can all shoot me but I do think that we're quite far behind on turn in terms of understanding customers really designing our products and propositions. I do a lot of work in the food sector. Food is really, really interesting when I was little, we had something called the milk marketing board, the beef marketing board, the marketing board, right and they set prices. And you go to your little shop around the corner, and you would be a price taker and a choice taker, and actually very grotty stuff was there. And that you can say supermarkets are good or bad and there are lots of issues around that, but they sort of broke that up, but they then captured me totally. But now, actually, the patterns in food are starting to become dispersed so I go for my base load. And then I will have a bit of self supply, right, like growth and carrots, you don't want to eat them, but I grow them. And then I had some special supply, which is, you know, maybe a veg box or something delivered to me specifically and I can go to the farmers market. This is all designed around choice. There is one interesting thing about storage here as well is the food sector before we had refrigeration food. We lost about 60% of food. And what is refrigeration and energy storage, but just bear with me on my crazy analogy. So refrigeration storage, what's that frozen food, grid scale batteries, refrigerated warehousing, EV cars, flash freezing. The most important component of the food system in terms of refrigeration is a fridge in your home, because if you didn't have a fridge in your home, supermarkets would have to be four times the size they are today. So I just think in other sectors what has happened how we how systems have been optimized. You only have two week crops a year, you eat bread every day. So actually the food system is more intermittent than the energy system, but these storage vectors have absolutely reduced an optimized system design. So I think it's a really interesting analogy. The second is from mainframe to PC. Oh, you've not got a big IBM churning out in the back right. And everything was designed around these big in many ways again bit like hose pipe type analogy. You start to get the PC which of course everyone said was going to be never worked never nobody was ever going to take it up. So I've got a system that's quite differently designed. It's not to say that you don't have large centralized supply of data. But what you have is you do is all designed around my utilization. It is not designed. I am not having to design myself around the mainframe. Some models have all been we've other people have gone through the model. And then we have this other challenge coming up which is this, the world of the customer is going to want more than energy, they are going to want assets to, and we were proposing. And I think some of it might happen in the capacity market. I'm not sure if I'm becoming very geeky here so do. But the capacity market and other markets. How are we going to unlock these assets for hard pressed customers and the just transition is a really, really important component of this. And we're not going to be able to do it if we're expecting people to write out checks. So service agreements financial service products, capacity market payments, etc. They have to be really important. And I don't know whether it's the same here in Ireland, but it's really, really, really difficult to get policymakers to really understand that this has to be a consumer led system. And so there's a recent consultation. So there's a recent consultations coming out on retail reform. So customer satisfaction or joy or pleasure or control or anything about customers is actually invisible it's all about structures and what the industry is going to do rather than customer centric. And so just to illustrate this. I have a dream. And the dream is that we open up the supply world to lots of different types of proposition so it comes back to my specialist supply. So I would like, let's say the car leasing company is Nissan car leasing with 10,000 cars in Dublin. Okay. So I've got 10,000 cars. They are selling me. They're leasing me a car with 300 miles embedded in it every week. Right. So I don't really know I'm buying I'm certainly don't know I'm buying electricity that's for sure. I don't know really that I'm buying energy, because fundamentally it's just come with a package like 300 miles. If of course I want to top up that's a different matter and more expensive right but anyway that is what Mr Nissan has got his 10,000 cars. So what is he doing he's adding capacity to the system so there is a micro capacity market payment. He also then sells not the 10,000 but 4,000 because to be frank 8,000 are going to be static all the time as we know. So they're just sitting out there. So they will sell it to, and they'll sell the flexibility to ESP networks in Dublin. Right. And there will be that that relationship, but also Nissan rather than me because I don't know how to access the best time the best tariff etc will be absolutely determined and focused on getting the cheapest commodity price possible, because the incentive for them is to do that, because in some ways we now got an incentive with suppliers who their incentive is display you more energy. But this model actually means that Nissan is really incentivized to get you the very very cheapest in the best way possible. So the incentives are aligned. I get a little bit of a cheaper car. And I also get much much cheaper miles. And I have no agro. I don't have to be engaged. I hate that when customers have to be engaged. Sometimes it means that they that the energy world want them to become heating engineers and I don't think that's despite me saying that I like being a plumber. I'm just not sure that we're wanting to turn people into energy gigs. The second theme was about digitalization and I'll be really, really quick on this, but from the 400 to the 100 million of actions and assets. If anybody thinks they're going to be able to do this with the system design that we've got today. I can again have a big shock, right? This is multiple changing consumer preferences. Lots of interactions between different asset classes with different characteristics, different personalities. You've then got issues around cascade. If you are the system operator, you're going to be saying, oh my God, I've got storage. I've got demand side. Different assets coming in at different times of the of the day. This has to be absolutely deeply digitalized and with all the protections to go with it. But it's going to need require a much more dynamic and bidirectional scheme, interacting in dynamic markets. So when people think that digitalization of the energy system is some form of. So when we started the digitalization task force, it was quite funny because we got all the networks in the room and one of them said, oh God, fabulous person, absolutely brilliant on digitalization. You must meet him. He rolled off. He rolled out Microsoft Word really, really well within the organization. I was going, oh right, okay, fine. So I think we've got to really go back here and start working out what your understanding of digitalization and data and all the rest of it. It is not the IT department in that sense, it is much much deeper. And to be frank, also when we look at it, it's going to have to be structural digitalization. It's not an add on it's not a nice little halo that you know one can get awards for it is actually part of the structure of the system. And these are the key components, which give you whole system visibility interoperability and automation. Absolutely crucial is this customer control and consent. If you don't have that you don't have flexibility assets. So basically you get very, very clear rejection. Automated asset registration so this is being developed at the moment in the UK. So that is quite far down the line. We also propose the digital spine, which is a very, very, very thin layer of interoperability across the whole system. And I would call it the HTML of energy. And I'm also working with the IEA to look at this as a global asset. So there's some really interesting stuff going on there and talk about that at some point share share data. It's always an interesting one all these companies thinking, oh my God, my data is incredibly valuable. It's so exciting. So what are you doing with it? Well, I don't know, but we've got it and it's really, really exciting and I'm sure one day it will be really valuable and they haven't even got data analyst to understand what really they're sitting on. The value of it is actually by sharing it and system operated visibility. So that is the digital journey that we've been proposing. And very, very last, but really the problem. Ultimately, and it's not the problem with the energy sector. It's the problem with so many different sectors. And that is that we need to change our culture and our skills. And everything is not about silos. It's about connectivity and interaction. We've got to be looking at greater diversity in all senses. But actually, there's a there's a very good, bad lesson. Apparently, VW was one of the very last companies to become to really embrace the EV change and how they did it. And his friend of mine who used to work for VW said, Well, it's not really surprising. Have you looked at the board? So the board, very diverse, fantastic in terms of superficially, they were all mechanical engineers. There you go. He could not believe that anybody would want to get into a horrible EV car. The other thing that's quite funny is, I don't know if you know, but Henry Ford's wife, Mrs Ford in the 20s. She loved her EV car much, much more than she did her petrol car. Ultimately, she got ridden by the market, not by Henry, because he was actually quite keen on EVs as well. So I'm going to suggest I would love to see the system operator in whichever country, the first country that does this, I will send them a bunch of flowers. I would love a chief executive of DHL to be running a system operation. If you think about the system, it is absolutely extraordinary. So I've got a pair of trainers in China. They go through about seven different transport vectors. Actually, human beings are in the middle of it. You don't have human beings in the system in that sense. You're not the people picking things up and putting them on something. So let's say seven different transport vectors, all of them interrelated, all of them run by different people, right? So, you know, the shipper is not the same as the trucker. And I, the customer, can see where at any moment, right the way through the whole process, where that package is, and if there's a problem or whatever. This is both customer centric and I wouldn't have thought a logistics company to be seen as being customer centric, they have. And the logistics of dealing with all the variabilities, it is all done through real deep digitalization algorithms, etc. But they can preempt and they can predict and then they can reshape their routines. So it's a really, they're really, really sophisticated. It's not DHL. It's all of those guys, right? The telco sector really, really important. How that works, particularly with the digitalized sort of, you know, multi fasted system, I think is really important. Consumer marketing. Oh, please come. Oh, sorry, please can we get consumer marketing people in to the energy sector, exciting propositions and Amazon that again gives me a lot of visibility and control. So losers and winners. So if you're a milk farmer, you're going to be a loser. Got to become a cheese maker. What you're doing is just selling a commodity, you're going to lose out to people who are actually designing and selling optimization services. If you take the victim approach to a customer, you will lose them to more innovative companies. And I'd love to see more data turned into product and services. I'm not sure of, you could say, you know, crazy vision. But I think that all the dynamics in terms of what decarbonization means, what the new cost base is what we've got to deliver consumers and how quickly we've got to do that. I think we can learn from others. We can start to understand what this system could look like. And I think we would also then give in many ways the customer and society, a decarbonization dividend, rather than in many ways, giving them the bill. Thank you very much. I found that absolutely fascinating. And as you said, a tour like right across such an expanse, I can just, I really marvel at your ability and skill to bring all of this to life in the room to take on relatively complex elements of this whole agenda and explain it and your use of analogy and your ability just to, you know, the fridge wouldn't you know, we didn't have fridges we'd have to the supermarket to be all of those are that are so many of them the course of your presentation that actually would bring home any of these complex propositions to even a very general audience. And this is not, let's be honest, a general audience this is a an expert audience but I'm sure it fascinated people in this room, and indeed online because I should have mentioned earlier. Welcome to those of you who have joined us online and are still with us. I know there's upwards of 70 of you. So I know most of you still be with us and we still have a nice group of people in the room. You all look very interested. And I'm sure you all have questions, and I'm open to questions and I'm sure Laura is as well, at least for a few minutes. So, who would like to offer. John Fitzgerald, say who you are we probably know who you are but tell us on your John Fitzgerald Trinity College Dublin and two questions security and a digitized system. My nightmare when I was on the board central bank was the payment system, and somebody, the Russians interfering with it, that you could collapse. Right the payment system, you could collapse the economy for a few days, but collapsing the energy system is worse so how can you deal with that risk. And the second, I found very striking at two nuclear power stations that's the equivalent of all the EVs and Britain. And to what extent can you use that you gave the example of Spain distributed storage, but if you have a couple who are expecting a baby imminently. And you, you that battery is drained through the night to provide storage. And do you do people have to say actually I'm going to need the car in the next hour, where normally they don't so how do you deal with that issue. Okay. I'm starting with the security thing so we had a lot of pushback from the sector when we talked about open data for the energy system. Right. When we're talking for talking about Russians and we're talking about interference. And they said well you know then people are going to be able to manipulate it and all the rest of it and I said well it's really quite interesting when you look at the infrastructure in the energy sector. If you go to the little substation around the corner from where I live. It's got a little padlock on. If you go to the really important one, you've got security guards, guns, dogs, etc. It's quite easy to know whether vulnerabilities are in the energy sector. Now, it's not to say that digitalization doesn't create in some ways a different routine and a different system design. But if you think the banking sector hasn't been bad. I mean it hasn't really has been pretty robust. All sorts of other systems that are really important have got the systems in place. We got GCHQ involved we got everybody, or what I call the secret squirrels, they all came out and visited us. There are some very very clear protocols. It's not to say that it isn't vulnerable, but to be frank it's vulnerable today and it is being encroached on today. You might find that just because things, my feeling is just because things aren't open or closed doesn't actually make them any safer. So I think there is lots and lots of system design that needs to be put in place there. Absolutely. But I don't think it makes it less resilient. So security in security of supply. I actually think it makes it more resilient, and I think it gives you greater visibility. And one of the things I think is going to happen as we get much more distributed assets is we are going to have more failures. But they're going to be quite limited failures. They're going to be, so we're going to have to be a little bit more relaxed about the UK, and I don't know about the Irish, but the UK gold platedness of the system is beyond any other country. I mean, it's absolutely, it's sort of absurd. And so we can, we can lose a little bit. But if I've got PV or an EV or a heat pump or something with flexibility, I have got more resilience. And so I think it's going to be the useful that on the EVs, everything is about consumer concern, and everything would have to be done pretty slowly. So when I was talking about the Nissan racing company, I was saying 4000 cars, right would be available out of the 10,000. Also, I think it's actually 8000 that will be static. You will have to start to learn and understand. And you can always say, on your charging and I'm with a very successful Irish company that tomorrow, which is an easy charging company, and you can put absolutely on your consent. I always want 20 miles in my tank, whatever. Right, or I always want 60 miles. Or I don't want to participate. Everything has to be driven by customers. And that's where in some ways the energy sector is going to find itself up against lots of different preferences and it's not really used to that. So it's a new world. Laura, wonderful lecture, really top-provoking and sorry, Peter O'Shea ESP. Really top-provoking. I thought some of the analogies were wonderful. As an electricity professional for more years than I remember now, you know, the structure of the industry is very much generation, which is becoming smaller, you know, smaller bite sizes, networks, which are becoming bigger, but smarter, and suppliers who are becoming more engaged in the service part of the industry and then of course the customers. But we are locked into that sort of structure, right? That's the structure we've sort of inherited through liberalisation and before that through engineeringisation, if you like. So that's the structure of the industry and what I'm seeing from your talk is something I think sort of transcends all of that. And I just want to give any thoughts to whether that sort of industry can develop organically or whether it really needs a really big push from government if we're to go in that direction. I think you're absolutely right. I probably don't remember. Right, the very, very first slide I had a child screaming in the corner. Okay. And this is me being rude about our regulator. And I say to them that they've infantilised the sector, actually. I mean, they haven't, but it's one of my analogies. In the sense that they certainly in the UK, they will tell a network what colour socks to wear on a Tuesday and what tie on the Thursday, right? And everything is process regulated rather than outcome regulated. And so, and if you think about it, and I don't know if it's the same here, but I'm sure it is, nothing really fundamental has changed since what for 40 years. Right, the supply. I mean, has the consumer changed in 40 years in everything else that it's doing. And it's a totally different animal. It's got totally different needs. If you look at the system, the system needs something very, very different. And so the regulation hasn't. And the problem is, is that politicians are very frightened to think with it. I personally think the place to start is with the retail side, because that is the way that you can unlock the rest of it. And it is actually, in my view, where it should start. We've got in the UK a price cap. And the government is never going to be able to come off this price cap ever. Unless it changes the whole experience. So it can't say, right, we're just going to take the price cap away. No one's going to go tonto. If what they say is actually, we have reengineered and reshaped how you will be getting energy. And this is exciting and this will be much more tailored around you. They've got to create a better landing place and then they will come off the price, then they can migrate off the price cap. At this moment, there is an opportunity. But on the whole, it's so heavily regulated that, you know, your bill has to look the same as everybody else. To be frank, a customer today in the retail market is really just choosing between different colored logos. Right. I mean, and a marginal change with customer service. But as nobody wants to ring their energy company, because they shouldn't want to ring their energy company. It's that's a negative rather than a positive. But so we need to start with the politics of energy and it's all the worst reasons it is very political at the moment. Then you redesign into the system. The other thing, of course, which is always fantastic with any politician is to say, oh minister, well that'd be very brave because the lights might go out. And that is always and it's absolutely it's a cliche beyond cliche below beyond cliche. And you know it works every single time. It worked on me. Thank you. Go for it. I could. Sorry. I realized the time. Sorry for him. I've got two offerings here. I'm going to take two together if that's okay. So one question each of you don't mind. And is there anybody else just really burning with a question I'm sure there are but unfortunately time is against us. So I think I'll just take those two. And then we'll close if that's okay. Thank you all very much. Yeah. Alex and thank you very much for the talk and coming out of the car and going straight on the stage. Well done. I'm Fergal MacDabara. I'm Fergal MacDabara. I'm the co-chair of the energy group here at the Institute and yeah. And I was really struck by the slide that you put up which was the new way of looking at the levelized cost of energy the whole of system costs. And let's definitely turn the table mats upside down because some of the conventional wisdom that we would have assumed about the cost of certain technologies is totally different as I just glance at your slide. And you said you wanted to do something with that and that's what I wanted to explore with you. You said maybe in the capacity market you could use it for evaluations or treasury or you're trying to impress treasury with it and get them to do something. Thank you. So I'll take my mind. Please, please. You have to remember that. Yes. Dono, I'm a member of the IEA. My question is very simple. You're basically called for major transformation of the electricity system. As a precondition of that. Do you think that it is absolutely necessary to separate the transmission and distribution businesses from the generation businesses. And as you know here in Ireland, they're controlled the ESB controls both and owns both. And I just ask you, is it a precondition for innovation that this separation should take place and I just don't mean a separation, nominally, separation of financing, separation of management, separation of ownership, and I don't mean privatization. I'm against privatization of the networks and the wires. So I'll start with that and I think everyone will have a, in some ways, a different view. The way we've cut the sector up is pretty arbitrary. I mean, it's, I don't know to what extent I mean I'm on the board of SSC transmission, which is very separate from SSC's distribution network right and these are. I don't really know what the logic was and I think the logic was because how the energy system when it was all nationalized was structured. Right. So I think it's a totally arbitrary thing. I think you could make case for either way for it to be much more integrated for one to look at new solutions. I mean, I would like to see a lot more micro grids and a lot more innovation in that field. To be frank, on one level, I would say to you, we are at such a difficult moment where certainly in the UK and I think it's exactly the same in Ireland, we have not got enough infrastructure to actually bring all this fantastic resource that we both benefit from. And I would just get on with it and not worry about those structures particularly I would really look at planning. I would really. This is very unlike me because I'm sort of quite like efficiency and productivity, I would do a bit of over build to just keep the cost, I mean reduce the cost over the longer period of time, get it done. And then we've got I mean we what we're doing in the UK we're building farms in the middle of the North Sea and forgetting to build the roads to the farms. I'm not a capitalist. I mean, who thought of that. And it's just ludicrous. So, I'm less interested in the structures of the distribution. What I would say is the distribution networks are very varied in the UK we've got lots of different organizations and some of them are really, really good. They're very exciting. And others are just still hose pipes not thinking about the future. And there does need to be a lot more tension there. On your whole I love that you like these those metrics. Right, so what's very weird about, and I'm sure it's, it is the same in every government you can tell me whether it is or not. This whole system design has been used for the last eight years in, in the UK for policy planning, not with the demand bit, but just on the supply bed right. It's been used for policy planning, but, but it never really gets into policy. It's really, really interesting. And it doesn't go beyond the modelers in the department, right. And the Treasury don't even, I mean, so I've been doing quite a lot of workshops with them on whole system costs, and for them to start to understand to use them as metrics. And really it's been the last two, 18 months I would say they're starting to understand it and they're starting to appreciate it. But God the levelized cost of electricity so simple that's why we love it a silver bullet. It's easy. No variables, etc, etc. Oh, this woman comes along and she wants everything to be a bit more complicated. But we are getting quite a lot of traction in parts of the Treasury. We are doing as I say quite a lot of work with the IEA and the World Economic Forum. We're doing a big piece of work for this cop coming up, which will be really trying to bottom this out. And the other thing that's interesting about it is once you've got those metrics, I've been talking to some of the pension funds and saying are you interested in doing mini CFDs for heat pumps, for example. Right. They said, yeah, sure. Well, we did smart meters. We can do, as long as we've got some form of contractual underpinning, we can really lean into distributed assets. So these metrics help value those assets within a whole system thing. Anyway, I dream, I dream a lot. Okay. So I hope, but they'll start to realize that certainly network costs and balancing costs are too big just to put as an extra in their calculations. Thank you so much. I'm just conscious of the time. And I'm sure people have things to do. And but it's a real testament to the quality of our speaker and the interest that people have shown that there's so many people still here to 30. And I know still online, I just want to thank and sincerely Laura as particularly as as Virgil said for just stepping down the steps and onto the stage without sort of missing a beat. And, but it just shows the professional from political arena advocacy all the things that you've done, and which I would normally go through and introduce a speaker at great length but we just decided not to do that and have you straight on but I think you've demonstrated without any introduction, how, how good a communicate you are these issues as I said I mean I'm we're crying out at the world is crying out for people who can actually communicate these complex questions to the broad audience and I would say that, you know, in fairness to ESB, if that has been part of the ESB's business is not simply just to function as an energy, you know, in the energy sector. By the way, if the such a thing as an energy sector in a discrete sense anymore and I think you've kind of made that point that you can't read all of the old lines that the institutions are all kind of breaking that, but I think that that's the business you know ESB is obviously got its own business to attend to what wants to ensure that it's not just part of the debate but fostering and facilitating these opportunities to disseminate information and help people realize how things are changing so fast. It's also the business that we're in, and in the Institute, the IEA, and so it's been my great pleasure to chair this session. We've three, four more to go in this, in this series. I want to thank you all for your attendance here today both in person and those of you who joined online, and thanks to Bevan Cody, in particular, and her team in the ESB, thanks to my own team in the IEA, and we look forward to seeing you all again but most importantly a big round of applause for our terrific speaker Laura Sam.