E352: The Grid is Becoming Optional | Energypreneurs Briefing

In the last year, Karim's 40-year IT company hired zero entry-level graduates. Every job junior coders used to do, AI does now. Karim and I studied high school together in Dhaka in the late 1970s. This episode I recorded driving him through Manila in a Tesla, and he joined the second half over a free one-hour video call from Dhaka. Neither one of those things existed outside Star Trek when we graduated. His company works with the World Bank, ADB, UNDP, WHO and UNICEF. We talk about what happens to a 40-year business — and a 40-year friendship — when AI takes over the work at the bottom of the ladder, and the question I keep coming back to: does AI narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, or widen it? The best moment in the whole conversation: my 75-year-old cousin in Bangladesh, diagnosing a sick chili plant by talking to ChatGPT in Bangla. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Disconnecting your house from the gas network costs you about $250. The gas companies say the real cost to them is $900. Somebody has to cover the difference, and Ben Potter has been watching the argument about who. Come and talk energy with me.  Ben spent a quarter of a century at the Australian Financial Review and has covered the energy transition for most of the last fifteen years. We get into Victoria turning off the gas and the death spiral in its distribution networks, why he thinks the pipeline owners are telling the regulator one thing and the public another, and why the same argument is not being had about closing coal stations. We also get into what privatisation actually got wrong (not the selling), why green hydrogen went on the back burner, why carbon capture never scaled, and whether electricity ends up as a flat monthly subscription. And right at the end, his father — a chemical engineer who tried to tell the State Electricity Commission how to burn brown coal better, and was told they had a thousand years of it in the ground. Ben Potter is a contributing editor at The Energy (theenergy.co), after 40 years in journalism and 25 at the Australian Financial Review. Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Australian wholesale power can trade anywhere from minus $1,000 to $23,000 a megawatt-hour, and it re-prices every five minutes. Marija Petkovic models what happens to that market as ten gigawatts of batteries arrive in it. Come and talk energy with me. We get into why the spreads open as renewables come in and close again as storage is built — and why Marija thinks that's the market working exactly as it should, not failing. Battery revenues in Queensland have already fallen 70% in a year, with not one coal plant gone yet. We also get into the chicken-and-egg nobody wants to own: state governments want the oversupply before they'll let coal close, and investors want the price signal before they'll build it. Plus why Queensland owning its own coal fleet gives it options no other state has, why nobody gets the spreadsheet out before buying a home battery, and what it was like being told at university that if renewables ever reached 20%, the sky would fall. Marija Petkovic is Founder and Managing Director of Energy Synapse, a market modelling and analytics firm working with developers and investors in utility-scale clean energy. Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Reah Sy has spent two decades building communications strategy for some of the world's largest institutions — ADB, the IMF, and multinational corporates. She's seen the shift from TV and print to social media, from reactive crisis comms to always-on reputation management, and now to an AI world where the line between real and fake is disappearing. We talk about what it takes to build a voice when everyone has one, why bots attacked ADB's annual meeting and what she did about it, how institutional climate communications has been quietly muzzled by geopolitics, and why AI won't take your job — but the person next to you who uses AI will. Reah Sy is a Communications Officer at the International Monetary Fund, previously a Social Media Communications Officer at the Asian Development Bank. Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

This is a different episode. Reah Sy has spent two decades building communications strategy for some of the world's largest institutions — ADB, the IMF, and multinational corporates. She's seen the shift from TV and print to social media, from reactive crisis comms to always-on reputation management, and now to an AI world where the line between real and fake is disappearing. We talk about what it takes to build a voice when everyone has one, why bots attacked ADB's annual meeting and what she did about it, how institutional climate communications has been quietly muzzled by geopolitics, and why AI won't take your job — but the person next to you who uses AI will. Reah Sy is a Communications Officer at the International Monetary Fund, previously a Social Media Communications Officer at the Asian Development Bank. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Australia's electricity regulator just cut wholesale prices 10% — because solar and batteries have penetrated the grid so deeply that supply is outrunning demand. In Southeast Asia, people are still paying 80 US cents a kilowatt-hour for diesel-generated power, with 40% of some island populations having no electricity at all. Mark Lister has worked on clean energy transition across both worlds. We talk about why the energy transition is happening fast in Australia and almost nowhere else, why AI is replacing knowledge but not the financing gap, and what it will actually take to move things in markets that are stuck. Mark Lister is Managing Partner at Asia Clean Energy Partners and co-organiser of the Southeast Asia Corporate Decarbonisation Exchange (CDX). Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Chris Cooper co-founded Orchestra Technologies, software that models and operates commercial and industrial energy projects — solar, batteries, EV charging, virtual power plants. More than 35,000 projects have run through it. His argument is uncomfortable for anyone selling battery revenue. The speculative front-of-meter income — frequency services, wholesale arbitrage — gets cannibalised as more batteries arrive. FCAS in Australia is already not what it was. As he puts it: batteries eat battery revenue. Which matters, because if that income is what justifies the project, the whole case is dead on arrival. Then the behavioural problem. Australia has a lot of home batteries and only about one in ten is connected to a virtual power plant, because people don't want someone else controlling their battery — even when they're paid for it. And a car is worse, because you need it charged when you need it. We also get into behind-the-meter versus front-of-meter markets for listeners outside Australia, and what a commercial or industrial site should actually do first. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Is the electricity grid really becoming optional? In this episode, Sohail Hasnie explores how rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and vehicle-to-grid technology are changing the relationship between households and the traditional electricity grid. Using Australia, Hawaii and Pakistan as examples, the discussion examines self-consumption, battery storage, virtual energy networks, grid "death spirals," and the growing ability of homes and neighborhoods to generate, store and manage their own electricity. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

For three and a half years we've charged our car from an ordinary power point. Two kilowatts — about a kettle. Thirty-two thousand kilometres, roughly four megawatt-hours, less electricity than one Australian house uses in a year. I set off this morning thinking seven-kilowatt home chargers should be restricted. By the end of the drive I'd changed my mind, and the reason is the three hours of free midday power retailers now have to offer. I brought Grok along to check my arithmetic. At one point it agreed with a number I'd got wrong. Come and check your own numbers with me, not the ones in the LinkedIn posts. This picks up where Ep 350 left off, Matt Rennie told me three EV chargers in one street can be a problem for a transformer. I think the answer isn't fewer chargers. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Matt Rennie said something that stopped me. The entire growth of Australia's grid — two to three gigawatts a year — is going onto rooftops, between 10am and 4pm. That leaves the other eighteen hours as a separate problem, and nobody has solved it yet. Then it got sharper. When his team asked a California control room what EV uptake was doing to the network, someone said it was like watching transformers pop like popcorn in a pan. Come and think it through with me. Matt Rennie is founder of Rennie Advisory — 110 people across six cities. Previously EY's global leader for utilities, strategy and transactions. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs