Switched On

Switched On is the BloombergNEF podcast, and its premise is clear: the analysts who build the research are the ones asked to explain it. Tom Rowlands-Rees introduces several of the episodes, and Kamala Schelling introduces the one on Spain's blackout. Each is a conversation with a BNEF analyst that stays close to the evidence. The questions are plain and pointed. When an analyst condenses a study of corporate nature risk into scores out of 10, the reply comes straight back that nobody got higher than a six. The range is wide, but it keeps returning to a few pressure points. Europe's power system is one. An analyst traces the 2022 crisis, when power cost around a thousand euros a megawatt hour, to a perfect storm. Russia cut its gas supply while Russian pipeline gas made up about 40 percent of Europe's gas, gas set power prices more often than it does now, and the French nuclear fleet had its worst performance in years. The same conversation looks ahead. As coal retires, gas makes up a bigger share of the remaining fossil fuel mix, which could make a future gas disruption more dangerous. Grid reliability is another. Looking back at the blackout that left Spain and Portugal dark for upwards of 10 hours, an analyst describes a system where everyone thought they were following the rules but were each following different ones. The market, in this account, was changing faster than the operating practices meant to run it, and Spain had joined Europe's 15-minute dispatch only a little more than a month before the outage. Costs and trade are a third thread. Battery storage has become cheaper as pack prices fell, helped by overcapacity in cell manufacturing, competition among manufacturers and a shift to lower-cost battery chemistry. Europe's solar build roughly doubled to over 80 gigawatts by 2024, which BNEF's analysts link to the region handling energy shocks better than it did a few years earlier. Electric cars act more slowly, because vehicles stay on the road for 20 years and new imports take time to reduce fossil fuel use. 'Finding Opportunity in a Complex Energy Transition' takes a wider view. It covers data centres pushing developers into power purchase agreements, restarts of old nuclear plants and gas plants fitted with carbon capture, and a BNEF base case of one billion electric cars on the road by 2050. What a listener gets is mechanism more than opinion: why a price spiked, how a grid's rules fell out of step with its market, and why one clean technology cuts fuel use faster than another. For grid questions, 'Spanish Blackout Lessons One Year On: Analyst Reaction' is a natural first listen. For the money side, 'Clean Power Costs Split After Years of Alignment' and 'How Fuel Price Shocks Are Rewiring Clean Tech Trade' carry the figures.