The rapid fall in solar PV and battery storage costs over the past decade is not an incremental improvement — it is driving fundamental, system-wide change in how electricity is generated, stored, and valued.
Solar PV and BESS deployment roadmaps, their cost trajectories, and the system optimisation challenges they create, are the key areas of my current focus. This sits alongside a long background in offshore wind development, policy, and advisory.
Solar and battery storage have moved from peripheral technologies to core building blocks of modern power systems. The key issue is no longer whether they matter, but how they are deployed, combined, and valued.
Solar economics are strongly shaped by output and location. Storage then determines how much of that energy can be shifted in time and converted into capacity value.
Solar scales rapidly because it is modular, repeatable, and fast to install. Batteries add flexibility, peak support, and a way of moving variable generation into useful hours.
Short-duration batteries can solve daily balancing problems. Higher levels of reliability require more storage, more generation overbuild, or both.
Rapid solar growth exposes weaknesses in systems built around inflexible generation and static pricing. These are design problems in the wider market, not failures of the technology itself.
Offshore wind is a large-scale infrastructure system. Its success depends on the fundamentals of strong wind speeds and shallow waters. With this established, the well-timed alignment of policy, leasing, consenting, supply chain capability, grid strategy, and investment structure is required. My work focuses on how offshore wind markets can be established to fit appropriately within the wider energy system.
Advising governments and institutions on offshore wind market development, including programme design, early market sequencing, technical assistance, and the conditions required for investment. This work has included support to emerging markets such as Brazil, India, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.
Hands-on project experience across development, permitting, environmental assessment, land rights, and delivery. This includes major UK projects such as Triton Knoll and Gwynt y Môr.
Experience in leasing, valuation, risk characterisation, and bid strategy, including major seabed rounds and floating wind opportunities.
Designed and led sector-wide programmes intended to reduce risk and accelerate deployment, including an £11 million offshore wind programme at The Crown Estate.
The offshore wind sector faces a significant skills shortage that constrains delivery. I co-founded Offshore Wind Learning, an e-learning platform designed to support workforce development and accelerate the pipeline of trained professionals entering the industry.
Energy systems are governed by interaction: generation, storage, transmission, demand, and timing. Looking only at headline generation cost misses the real problem.
Electricity value depends on when power is available, not just how much is produced.
Storage shifts energy through time, manages peaks, and reduces curtailment, but its value depends on duration, cycling, and system context.
The right comparison is rarely one technology against another in isolation. The real question is how combinations of technologies perform as systems.
As reliability requirements rise, costs tend to increase non-linearly because they require more redundancy, more storage, and more careful balancing of resources.
System optimisation is about designing interactions, not championing individual technologies.