Meet the Team – Head of Product – Leonidas Spiliopolous
Welcome to our “Meet the Team” series, where we provide insights into the skilled professionals behind our key developments. In this interview we introduce our Head of Product, Leonidas Spiliopolous. He is the driving force behind our product, Podium AI., the advanced energy management system that powers our renewable systems at Wattstor. But about that, Leo will tell you more.
Leo, can you provide a brief overview of your background and why you joined Wattstor?
Sure. I have been passionate about energy, the energy transition and achieving net zero for many, many years. My background has always been in the energy sector and in product management. Particularly, I have been working with trading companies, helping them navigate the difficulties of wholesale energy markets.
When the opportunity from Wattstor came along, I immediately jumped on it because it combines both of those things. It combines the transition to net zero. We’re helping our customers transition to clean energy and net zero. And I can also contribute with my professional experience of wholesale trading markets, as we are helping our customers at Wattstor access the wholesale markets.
What are some of the key technical skills that you bring to Wattstor? You already said that you are pretty experienced with the wholesale market. Tell me more.
Wattstor enables our customers to access additional revenue streams, so they can increase their return on their investment on their renewable system. And one of those revenues is the access to the wholesale market.
Now, the wholesale market or the trading markets is a niche within the energy world. And it requires a very specific set of knowledge and set of skills. The big trading organisations have been trading for many, many years. This is how they have been making money. They use what we call price volatility in order to make money.
They take advantage of low prices, so they buy. And then they take advantage of high prices, so they can sell.
Now, Wattstor takes that price volatility and makes it available to our end customers. And not only we make it available to our end customers, but we do this at a reduced risk for them. Because we have the optimisation and the forecasting techniques in order to give them the volatility, but with a reduced or no risk at all.
This is what I bring to Wattstor: knowledge about how the wholesale markets operate and how we can access the wholesale markets. This, coupled with product knowledge and delivering end-to-end products for our customers is what I’m here for.
Thank you. And what exactly are you working on at Wattstor?
I’m working on our platform, Podium. Podium is an energy management system: an integrated solution with two components. It has a hardware component and a software component.
The hardware component is a device that goes onto a renewable site. You can think about it as the muscle. It tells the site what to do. And it’s also our eyes and our ears on the site. It tells us everything that happens on the site in real time.
The software side is the brain. It’s the one that allows the customer to see exactly what’s happening on the site on a real-time basis. But it also allows us to use forecasting to optimise the site and operate the site in the most economical and profitable way for our end users.
And how exactly do you trade at the right time?
In order to trade at the right time, we use forecasting, a way of predicting the price of the electricity at a specific time of the day.
And this is something that has been happening for years. It’s not new. The electricity markets and the shape of the price curve – as we call it – is pretty standard.
The prices are pretty low overnight when there is a low consumption. They are higher during the morning when everybody is getting up to get ready for the day. Prices are then high again in the evening when everyone is coming back home and they are turning on their ovens so they can cook.
We use forecasting methodologies that allow us to forecast that shape and the price. That’s how we know at what times of the day is the right time to buy and what times of the day is the right time to sell. We capture that price differential – what we call the spread.
Part of the energy management system is also the battery. What role does this play in the system?
That’s a very important role in a renewable system. The battery storage is the controllable asset.
It’s the asset that allows us to control a renewable system. A renewable system will have three components. It will have some sort of renewable generation like photovoltaic PV panels or wind.
It will have a storage system or battery solution. And typically it has a load. It has a factory or a storage facility that it consumes some of that electricity.
Without the battery, you cannot really control that system, right? Because the energy is generated when it’s generated. When the sun is shining or wind is blowing, then you get the energy. But you cannot really control how you’re going to deploy that energy.
Whereas the battery comes in and it gives us the ability to store that energy and decide when to deploy it. Either for self-consumption to cover the load or to export it to the grid and make some extra money there.
You mentioned the prices and the volatility several times. The latest news shows us that there is more and more volatility in the markets. How does that really work? And can you explain why it is even happening?
Yes, of course.
So volatility is increasingly happening in the electricity markets. There are several reasons for this. The key reason, though, is the increased penetration of renewables in our generation mix.
Like a decade ago, most of our electricity would come from thermal power stations, gas stations, coal stations. And this form of generation is controllable. You can control how much you’re going to generate at any given point and there isn’t much volatility.
Nowadays, we have renewable generation in our energy mix. This is really important because it helps us in our transition to net zero. But it does bring volatility because we cannot control when the power is generated.
When the sun is shining, all PV stations are generating. So that uncertainty on the volumes that are coming into our grid, it creates what we call volatility, the spike of the prices.
We have really low prices when all the renewable energy is generating, even negative prices. And then when there is no sun or there is no wind, we have high prices. And that price differential is the volatility.
We’re going to be seeing more and more as the time goes by and we have increased penetration of renewable generation. And that’s how batteries can help us mitigate that problem. Apart from the renewable generation, though, there are other reasons for volatility.
There are reasons like geopolitics, for example. People have become very aware of that after the Ukraine war, where Russian gas became unavailable. And because gas is a key parameter for determining electricity prices, the movement of the gas price influences also the movement of the electricity prices.
So when the gas price changes, the electricity price also changes. And we’re seeing that now. We’re seeing a spike on the gas prices right now in the middle of the summer because of increased demand in Asia.
And that leads us to increasing electricity prices here in Europe. So you can see that in a way, the electricity market has become global to an extent. But its connexion with gas, it makes a global market, essentially.
Can you explain why the prices of electricity is connected with the prices of gas?
Yes, because the fact is that most of our thermal generation, non-renewable generation, these days in Europe, is coming from gas. Most of the coal has been phased out now. Not entirely, but we are getting there.
So most of our non-renewable generation is coming from gas. So the gas stations are the ones that they are providing us what we call the base load, right? The majority of our electricity. And as a result, this means that these stations – the gas stations that they’re using gas and buying gas at the market prices – are the ones that are setting the price or they’re largely influencing the price of electricity.
That’s why the price of gas is connected with the price of electricity. Because we are using gas in order to generate most of our electricity.
One more question outside of work. What are some of your interests in your free time? Are they connected to energy markets?
Outside of work, I like to spend time with my family. I like to spend time with my friends and I like to play tennis whenever I get the chance.
I think about energy a lot. But when I’m outside of work, I am trying to decompress, recharge my batteries and come back even stronger.
Thank you, Leo, for an insightful interview. And if you want to know more about the other members of our team, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or connect with us on LinkedIn.