An Interview with Evangelos Pastras
Before he takes part in our Engineering for the Energy Transition event as part of the #All4Climate Italy 2021 summit, Evangelos Pastras sat down to be interviewed by Edward Wilson from COP26andbeyond.
Evangelos is a Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate of Imperial College London with an interest in construction management and innovation, sustainability and energy decarbonisation. Starting his career as a civil engineer on residential and infrastructure projects across the UK, Evangelos has now moved to project management of Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Li-Ion projects and has been part of the development of more than 250MW of storage facilities including one of the largest (50MW) Firm Frequency Response Battery Storage projects.
Our thanks to Evangelos for agreeing to have this fascinating conversation.
Edward Wilson: Could you give us a bit of introduction to yourself, how you got into engineering and what you work on at the moment?
Evangelos Pastras: I come from an engineering family, my father is a civil engineer so I was brought into construction from a young age, I spent most of my summers on-site, and I was intrigued by how quickly things got out of the ground and became an actual tangible asset, whether that’s a house or a skyscraper or a bridge, it brought value from nothing. With a lot of work and information and skill, it became something that was materially significant for the people that used it. So that’s what got me interested in civil engineering and engineering in general.
I was intrigued by how things work, that applies to both electrical and mechanical equipment, and that led me to pursue a degree in civil engineering in the UK. I left Greece when I was 17/18 years old to study in London and I got my degree in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Imperial College London after 4 years. I graduated in 2016 and did my thesis in concrete microstructure and the Interfacial Transition Zone.
After graduating from University I found a job in construction as a site engineer. I started on a housing project in Essex, moved to infrastructure in Sussex, and then back to housing in (Berkshire). Housing is quite simple and repetitive, once you’ve done it once or twice you understand the drainage, the electrical aspects of it, the structural aspects of it, then you can replicate it, amend it, tweak it based on site conditions. This repetition is what led me to start looking into opportunities in the energy industry. I left my first job to join an EPC contractor, so I didn’t move away from construction I just changed the topic of my interest.
I started as a site civil engineer with a Greek EPC in the UK called METKA EGN and did the first 50MW battery site in the UK in Preston. That site is now operational and is one of the top 3 performing battery assets in the UK capacity markets. I got involved with battery storage early.
Is battery storage something you sought out as an area you thought was important and wanted to work in?
It was, for some reason when I came across the basic business model of a battery storage site, the first thing that came to mind was a power bank. Most times that I leave my house I have a power bank in my bag. I wondered why, if its use is so obvious to me, without any particular knowledge in electrical engineering, why hasn’t something like this been implemented in a large scale? Why was there so much of a lag between the energy generation market boom (PV, Wind), and storage lagged so far behind?
That is what intrigued me and I saw how it could be used on a big scale. It triggered my interest and I decided to get involved, even if it was as a civil site engineering looking after foundations and steelwork, which was my field, it felt like a natural step from housing and infrastructure, it felt like I was producing more for the greater good than just building another house.
Can you explain to our readers what the role of battery storage is in the grid now and what role battery storage aims to play in the future?
The more we use batteries the more we discover ways they can be used on grid-scale.
If you start from the baseline of a power bank, which is if you need power you take it from your store, if you have excess power you put it back in so you can use it later on, that is the basic functionality of a battery facility. There are a lot of issues even with that basic function on a global scale. There are countries that don’t have the capacity, the legal framework or the infrastructure to support a function like this because you need to have agreements for the purchase of electricity, agreements for the sale of electricity and those will have to be done with the equivalent national grid operator. That’s one of the holdbacks that are preventing batteries from being implemented on a large scale.
The second function that batteries can perform is frequency regulation. Imagine a car trying to go uphill, just to maintain your speed to go up a slope you have to pump more gas to maintain speed because there is more resistance. In a similar fashion, the electricity grid of a country, city or house, needs to have its generation of energy in sync with its consumption. What electricity grid operators know is that when you have peaks of consumption you need to have equivalent generation facilities available to compensate for that increase. In the morning when everyone wakes up there is a peak in demand, but the same peak doesn’t necessarily happen in generation. If energy supply comes from a coal plant it’s not like you can suddenly start putting more coal in the oven to accommodate that demand - that is where the battery comes in. The second function of Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) functionality is firm frequency response. This means that within minimal reaction times batteries can match demand and supply and ‘shave off’ the peaks to make the grid more stable.
So it matches the grid supply and demand?
In almost real time. In fractions of a second you can have a battery exporting to your grid to match a peak in demand.
If the batteries were not there, and demand exceeds supply significantly, you would have systems dropping offline. In the UK last year in the summer, we had one big wind generation facility go offline (along with a gas plant, after a lightning strike) and that led to all the trains (across the country) going offline for a couple of hours, with the obvious ripple effects. And that’s because we didn’t have a big enough battery to compensate for that sudden drop in supply.
Do you see batteries having a role in the future on a massive scale where they are able to replace generation assets if they drop offline? Is it a question of timescales?
Perhaps. For greater magnitudes we have other facilities to produce that power such as gas peaker plants. The scale of the batteries on the market currently are between 10-50MW (maybe 100MW) per site. The gas peaker plants are much slower to react (they take a few minutes to turn on) but they are more in the range of 300MW per plant.
Batteries are not the holy grail of net zero, but it’s a solution that’s not going to go away because it makes electricity more manageable. The electricity grid, consumption, generation, everything becomes more flexible.
And as we go to a grid with more and more renewables, and given they are intermittent by nature, do you see batteries having more of a role?
The biggest advantage of batteries is that they can accommodate the integration of intermittent sources such as wind and solar. To give you an example from Greece where I am from, we have 300+ days of sunshine a year so generation from solar exceeds demand by far, the problem they have is that there is no sun overnight, and thus no generation. Even though there is excess generation during the day they are still relying on diesel generators or coal plants at night to power up islands for example, that are not connected to the main grid. In these sort of scenarios the battery would act as more of a generation plant overnight rather than a regulator, so it is flexible.
Are the batteries in the plants you work on Lithium-Ion?
Yes, the majority of batteries on the market at the moment are Lithium-Ion.
You mentioned regulations being one of the big things holding back the widespread use of batteries in the grid. What are the other challenges? Lithium supply? Space?
Price.
At the moment, as with every new technology mass deployment of batteries is held back by price. If you follow the supply chain this is ultimately because of the price of the raw materials like Lithium Ion. Even though it is a relatively new technology it is quite straightforward to build, both electrically and from a civil perspective. They are not complicated sites such as an offshore oil rig or an offshore wind farm, they are not as demanding from an engineering perspective. However, there is only so many lithium ion modules that can be produced per year and there is only so much lithium ore that can be extracted to be made into battery cells. These are significant limiting factors at the moment, price and raw material supply, as with anything else. With solar panels for instance, we saw a significant drop in price after two or three years but the raw materials were readily available. I think we’ll have to wait and see how it plays out with batteries.
And to see whether governments bring in the right kinds of incentives to add battery storage to the grid?
At the moment National Grid in the UK is desperate for more batteries, because of the flexibility it gives them to manage their own resources.
One other thing to keep in mind with Lithium Ion and batteries in general, is that technical innovation has a significant impact on these projects. We are expecting a doubling of energy density per module in 5 to 10 years. So that means an acre of land of batteries in 5 to 10 years will be getting twice the capacity.
Do you envisage modules in the plants you are building now being swapped out by upgraded version later on?
Possibly, and other than Lithium-Ion there is research being done on other chemical energy storage technologies.
That’s a fantastic overview of your work thank you very much.
On a slightly different topic, do you think young engineers are currently being prepared for the energy transition by their education? Are they learning the right kind of skills and what was your own transition like from housing to energy?
That is a two fold question. If you are asking if engineers have the capacity to be the key to the energy transition in my eyes the answer is yes! However, that has a prerequisite that knowledge and training are available to young engineers. At the moment I am part of a Young Engineers Working Group for the World Federation of Engineering Organisations (WFEO) and one of the key things we are dealing with is youth representation at events like COP26, and their involvement in the big decisions that are being made now but are going to affect the upcoming decades and future generations.
To answer your question on the educational system, I think we have a long way to go, on a global scale. We are both from a western background and unfortunately are not the majority. We are privileged enough to be having these conversations now, when there are so many people around the world who could have been bright engineers but instead have to solve their basic needs before thinking about anything else. So yes, the knowledge is here, we are not waiting for a miracle to solve our problems. The question is how do we make sure we give youth the opportunity to utilise that knowledge, to first absorb it and understand it and then to utilise and materialise it. I think we are going in the right direction.
But there is more work to be done!
Exactly, which is why these events such as yours and COP26 and all the side events that include people not necessarily from an engineering background are critical to how it will play out.
Can you tell us a bit more about your work with WFEO?
We have been trying to create a network that brings together engineering organisations across the globe. WFEO has over 100 member organisations, and all of them have young engineers, plenty of which are not clearly represented in their organisation or in general. So what we have started doing is putting these organisations in touch with each other and synchronising their knowledge base, issues and goals, so we can enable and enhance collaboration between them. A challenge an engineer in Sub-Saharan Africa has might be surprisingly similar to an issue an engineer in mainland China may have. We hope to accommodate collaboration along these lines.
We are also focusing on COP26 and preparing a joint statement on behalf of Young Engineers, bringing together organisations such as YOUNGO, UNESCO, UNFCCC, who all play a role in COP26 and all of which have young engineers that we think should be more involved and better represented in such events, let alone in decisions made at such events.
Well, we are all in favour of that.
Thank you very much, that is a fantastic introduction to your work and I look forward to carrying on our conversation at our event on Sept 29th.