 Hi, this is your host Sophani Bhartiya and welcome to our monthly series on cost cutting versus cost efficiency. And today we have with us once again, Anteleno Monti, professor at RWTH Aachen University and also chair of Technical Advisory Council at LF Energy. Anteleno, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you. Same for me. Great to be here. Yeah, this topic is of really importance because not only the general global trends that are we seeing, Europe is also going through a war, which is also increasing the cost of energy. I was talking to a company and he was a good friend as well. And he was like, see, I'm actually wearing a jacket when I'm in the office because we are also trying to make sure that we are not using too much heat there. So talk a bit about what you are seeing in the space which is forcing or encouraging companies not only for cutting costs, but I think it also makes them in a way also more cost efficient. So talk about it. What are you seeing there? I think there are several directions that are happening at the same time. And first of all, one clear trend is to get more energy conscious. So taking care of monitoring and be aware of your consumption. It's something that is going across the industry, but also private people are getting more aware of energy before it just comes. Now we think about it. This is a very important step. At the same time, I think all this situation is clearly creating a motivation for self-consumption and self-generation. So going into local installation or renewables is clearly the easy answer to keep under control of the cost and also keep predictability about the future because basically you achieve a situation in which you have much more control of your cost because it becomes deterministic. You make an investment, you know the return, and you can calculate. And I think this is being the positive side of the story because we expect this to bring more installation and the growth of renewables in the upcoming time. And this is happening actually. And like I said, I've been here at every level. It's not just the industry, but the privates are also doing it. Talk a bit about, you know, when we do look at cost cutting, energy plays a very big role in that as well. The data centers are becoming more and more cost efficient. Officers are also becoming more and more cost efficient. Talk a bit about, because we talk to a lot of energy and we have been talking about reducing the carbon footprint, becoming more and more sustainable energy. How does it make a lot of industries more cost efficient if they have a very good policy towards becoming more energy efficient as well? Well, reducing cost, when we come about efficiency is also a quite tricky topic because at the end we are talking about bringing more efficiency in the process internally. But that doesn't mean that overall the efficiency is improved because what we need to, in this revolution, is to make it more use of storage. And when we talk about storage, the overall energy balance will bring new losses for the good. So it's a strange balance between what we call classically efficiency and what is the efficiency at the end from the point of view of what can be the better use of local resources and also making use of renewables. Can you share if you have seen any examples or, you know, where you are seeing that companies are taking these steps to become more energy efficient or cost efficient? Well, I can use directly my university as an example. And we took this very seriously because, first of all, as corporate responsibility, we have to do this, but honestly, also because of cost reasons. So what we have been establishing are internal green funding that we will use to reinvest in the capability of green project, particularly means having the possibility to install PV, for example, on the roof of our building. And the way we do it will link this to any kind of effect in which we actually have an impact negative on CO2, and that means mostly trips. So whenever we fly somewhere, we put an internal tax system to collect money that will then be used by the university to reinvest in green projects. What are the trends that you're seeing are happening globally because right now it is, you know, just for Europe, you know, the war crisis that are going on there. But do you also see at global scale also a lot of efforts are going on where companies also or countries are looking at becoming more energy efficient to become more cost efficient? I think so. I don't believe this is just a European of course we do under a different type of pressure. This is the speed over which we change in one year. If you look at our dependency of Russian gas in Germany, it's just impressive. But I think this is setting a reference in which also another part of the world with a different pace, maybe with less pressure in other places, but they see that this is possible. And then that set, you know, the condition also for other countries to follow. And so I think this is, you know, like also with the pandemic, we were able to find a positive side of the pandemic. We have to do the same here, find a positive side of such a sad situation. Let's like narrow down our focus on LF energy. Talk a bit about some of the LF energy projects, which kind of help organizations, you know, better gauge and kind of control their energy costs. Well, I meant two things. One is that we have launched a project for internal specification, open specification, not only software but also hardware for meters, which means thinking about the so-called smart meter in a new generation that will benefit all those aspects we were mentioned before related to monitoring some added services on top of the simple billing aspect of the smart meter. But another important element that we are doing the foundation is the carbon data specification, because the other point is to connect my consumption to my impact. And that's where the carbon data specification project is a big role, because we have to come to this new mentality that any time we do an action as a consequence and this consequence could be or must be measured when it comes to CO2 impact. If I asked you, as you gave example of your own university, do you have any advice to organizations or governments so that they can embrace certain practices to become more energy efficient, more cost efficient? One thing, I guess, which is really important, maybe because I'm a professor, it is a priority, but it's mostly education. I think for people it's really hard to understand a lot of the aspect related to efficiency. Like the example I made before about storage, when we talk about efficiency, what do we really mean? And understanding all these complex processes is not trivial and people normally don't have this background. So I think education, in the sense to making things understandable to more people, not only the techie, let's say, I think is a high priority to get people engaged in the future. I think another very urgent point is to encourage regulators to facilitate more and more the use of smart solutions. We have been talking about smart, great smart solution now for many years, but at the end is still very many, many times, too many times convenient for great operator to invest in copper and steel. We would like in the future to invest more in software and particularly open source software would be the best way forward and still the regulation is not there to make this the easy choice for great operator. They're a business. They think in terms of business, we need to make sure they see the value economically speaking. Anteneno, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about cost efficiency and energy efficiency. Also, I really appreciate not only you sharing the example from the University, but also sharing some of the advices that their companies or organizations can use to tame their energy bills. I really appreciate your time today and I look forward to talk to you again soon. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure again.