#9: Stefan Grosjean: It's Too Late For Nuclear!

In this episode of the EV Charging Podcast, we go way beyond the box. Join Daniel Carson and Jeff Sykes from Solar Choice as they sit down with visionary entrepreneur Stéphane Grosjean—founder and CEO of Smappee—for a thought-provoking journey into the past, present, and future of smart energy.

From building remote meter readers in the '90s to developing cutting-edge home energy management systems and dreaming of ocean-based charging kites, Stéphane shares the story behind his 30+ year mission to revolutionise how we produce and consume electricity. Discover how Smappee is using EV chargers as a Trojan horse for a smarter, more responsive energy grid—and why the sun might just be humanity's ultimate nuclear solution.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone passionate about renewables, decentralised energy, and where the EV and smart home ecosystem is headed next.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:10

Hello everybody and welcome to the EV Charging Podcast, taking you behind the scenes of the electric vehicle charging industry in Australia and around the world. I'm Daniel Carson. And I'm Jeff Sykes. And we're your hosts from Solar Choice, Australia's largest independent quote comparison platform for electric vehicle chargers, solar, heat pumps and batteries. This week, we're bringing you an interesting conversation from late last year with Stéphane Grosjean, the CEO of Smappy. Stéphane has been in the energy industry for a long time. He's a serial entrepreneur, and he's looking way into the future with some creative, fun, mind-boggling ideas about what might be on the distant horizon. We know you'll enjoy this one. Welcome to the EV Charging Podcast. We're very fortunate today to be joined by Stéphane Grosjean, joining us all the way from Belgium. Stéphane is the founder and CEO of Smappy, or now Smappy Group. and has a really long history of an entrepreneurial journey, starting lots of companies in the energy space. And we're really thrilled to have you joining us. Thank you, Stefan.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41

It's my pleasure. Looking forward to the rest.

SPEAKER_03: 1:44

Excellent. Well, we've been very fortunate to speak to a number of guests as part of our podcast who have probably not been in the game quite as long as yourself. Some of them in their first company or the start of their entrepreneurial journey. Maybe you could wind back the clock for us and tell us a little bit about how you started and and how you got into this sector with the first company that you started?

SPEAKER_00: 2:06

Well, as a young engineer, I started in a telecom company making modems, the time, you know, when we used modems to connect to the internet. And that was the time where electricity companies had mechanical meters, you know, with the disk, non-digital and with pulse contacts. And large customers had to be read remotely because there were really lots of millions involved in the monthly consumption bills and they were looking for a solution to do data collection remotely. That is where I learned my first or had my first expertise to build a data logger and the associated software to really collect energy data for the utility companies here in Europe. and i founded my company i was 28 that's a long time ago in 1991 and had two business units in mind two solutions one was for those utility companies the grid companies to collect really commercial industrial meters But those large energy consumers also saw the value in the energy data, how they could submit or eventually their processes, how much energy do we consume for the production of this product on production line one and two. So that led me into using the same data collection for energy efficiency, energy management. And as such, with this company that I built up to a global leader internationally after 20 years being market leader in utility space, but also in commercial industrial for submetering and energy efficiency. I sold the business to Elster, which was a electricity, gas, water meter manufacturer, now in the hands of Honeywell, as the complement of what they made. I saw that customers like Walmart, 5,000 tours in US, or Tesco in UK, were able to reduce 40, 45% in their energy usage and consumption by looking at the data, having the insights, tuning air conditioning systems that were running without liquid, cooling liquid, and consuming and running all the time. So by looking at the data that we collected with energy, we were able to give them a BI too, an energy BI, business intelligence too, that led to reductions, optimizing the way they consume, reducing the cost, and being able, and that was what we saw, to participate in demand response programs to help the utility companies to reduce the consumption at peak points by engaging those very large energy consumers. So that is what I did for 20 years. I sold the business after being international, going public, and I found it snappy to do actually the same but with behind the meter for homeowners initially because I saw that and the time was ripe in 2012 to use apps because software has had to be very easy and available for a home user you wouldn't send them to a SaaS platform on the internet they wouldn't do it anyway and the time came was ripe to start providing data in a intelligible way. And we saw a change of behavior with those users that reduced the consumption in homes, households by 12%. And that is what is still our ambition with Smappy, to provide a tool that reduces the consumption. The problem we saw was that self-install was good for 5% of the population, the tech-savvy people, but that the mass market wouldn't do it. So we turned toward electricians installers and first to solar installers who went in to sell a few thousand euro dollar whatever and then take that home energy manager along to help provide those insights to home users what we have seen is That standalone, it didn't work because it was 250, 300 euro and too cheap for an electrician to say, I won't make money on that. And I will get a lot of questions. I won't do it. So we had to combine it in a way with solar and nowadays with EV. Where in the EV land, we noticed that first we tried to interface to all kinds of EV brands, EV charger brands. to make them smart, use energy with dynamic rates, optimize their own solar energy usage by charging faster when you have excess solar so you don't inject it in the grid to take it back in and provide the grid with excess energy and problems. We said we will optimize that. That's what I anticipated. But we saw that it didn't work because energy chargers for car industry were guys making a box with a cable, an outlet for a car. They didn't understand energy management. And so we stepped into making better charges with good, accurate measurement, all embarked, and that is how we used the EV charging as the opportunity to get into the homes, but with the final endgame to provide a tool to homeowners to get insights, to reduce their energy consumption, because the 12% you don't consume, you don't even have to produce them with solar it's always better and then the next thing is to optimize the use of energy to facilitate and accelerate the transition to solar to wind where the only problem we have with solar and wind is is the fact that you can't turn on the wind and the sun when you need more energy you can't turn it off when you have too much so instead of turning the valves in the power plants we turn the valves in the homes and in the businesses where we use more or less energy according to grid. Our ambition is to be the home energy manager, the business energy manager and control controllable assets in such a way that we toggle or we address the challenge that renewable bring, the fact that you can't centralize the control, that you have decentralized distributed generation production that you need to manage there. That's actually the The big picture of the history what I did, how I came, it's more than 30 years, so I have seen the evolution and this allowed me to anticipate, be a bit visionary if I may say it, because I was early in that market of telecommunication. I have seen what data with energy can do, how we can reduce, and how we can contribute to that faster transition to renewable energy.

SPEAKER_03: 9:38

Yeah, it certainly seems like you've been thinking about this problem and the solutions for a lot longer than a lot of people. And maybe you're in the right place at the right time and had some of the right ideas that set Energy ICT up to be so successful. but then carrying those ideas into a residential setting and using SMAPI as an electric vehicle charging company, almost masquerading as an electric vehicle charging company when really the core of the business or the vision is in energy efficiency and management.

SPEAKER_00: 10:10

It is indeed still the case. Energy data is where we come from and where we will end in. in controlling those uh to be controlled assets that really need to be uh controlled in that smart way in a smart grid uh that's that's absolutely um the case

SPEAKER_02: 10:33

yeah so stefan uh if we go back even further you've built a career in energy when you were a young man, a student. Did you always know that the energy space was one that you were passionate about or did you sort of stumble into it?

SPEAKER_00: 10:51

Absolutely. If I look back at notes that I found at home, digging into boxes and when I was 14, I remember that I was so impressed by the chemistry lesson hydrogen splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with just electricity I did that at home took water salt because I heard that this helped the ions were useful two tubes and I started to produce and of course I was 14 and I made some assumptions and I measured how much electricity I did put and I measured the volume of hydrogen I created and said, oh, I'm making a liter with so much electricity. And I was aware that at that time, some car could run on hydrogen instead of liquefied petrol gas. I had read that and did put the link that, oh, I make a liter, I will take the alternator of the motor, produce the electricity to split the water and then feed it into the motor of course being a bit older you understand as an engineer that this is a perpetual mobility and that this doesn't work my calculation error was that i was using liters in gas and liters were in LPG were liquefied so there is a difference between a volume a liter of gas and the liter of and and that is where I made a mistake but I was intrigued and passionate about making a motor running on electricity by the intermediate fuel being hydrogen and And that is in the way that I was looking into things, how does it work, being curious, thinking, inventing in a certain way. And on that note that I found that was written, this is the motor of the future, the motor of energy saving. Really, I found that note some five years ago and said, Jesus, that's connecting my dots. My thing has always been in nature in actually I wanted to build an undersea boat a little van kind of dimensions that would be an undersea boat and of course it had to run on something well the seawater is water with salt and that imagination led me because I wanted to travel around the world undersea and be independent of not have to pay energy and be clean as well so So imagination and thinking in a different way, creating, is what leads to new ideas. I don't know how we say in English, but my life saying, I would say, or phrases come from Jules Verne, the French author, writing books on going to the moon 80 days around the world with the air balloon 20,000 miles under sea. He said that all great things in this world have been created and thought in the name of exaggerated hope. Maybe it's exaggerated hope, but it drives me. And at the end, I have... done nice things. I built companies, I helped, I contributed. And my end game, if you want to know, one of the many divisions, that's why I'm CEO of the Smappy Group. I have a CEO that will run the machine, do the stuff I don't want to do, you know, the people, the things. And I'm creating new divisions. And the last division, I won't say what I'm doing, the four, five, six, but fantastic, incredible products. But one of the The last thing that I want to do is recharging boats in the oceans. At a certain point in time, boats will also drive electric or be fueled with the current combustion engines. And what I want to do is generate that energy in the oceans, not around the coast, not to have a cable feeding the continent. in the middle of where boats travel in the oceans with wind energy with kites going a mile high taking that giant quantity of energy a football field big kite that really drags along little boats with like a car breaking and generating electricity and those little boats boats that are like drones completely autonomous will go to the mothership where we have either a platform or a big mothership where we discharge those little boats that are thousands of them in the oceans coming to discharge or give the electrons to the to the mothership where in a certain way we either convert them to electricity and storage and batteries if the boats would be like the traditional cars plugging in and charging the batteries or making hydrogen on the sea. So in a way, you know, three quarters of the planet or two thirds of the planet is oceans. Why would we have to put those wind turbines and sticks on the land? We need to live there. We need to use the land for agriculture, to create food. So that is what I want to do. So guys, every year you can challenge me, have a new podcast, say, where are you building that? Remember that this is what I'd like to do. I hope I will be able to do it. I will live. and see that, and then afterwards I will kind of hand over. So I have some time to transfer that passion into the already passionate Smappy team. I believe maybe this is why I'm here in this universe, that this is my mission as a human to contribute to Smappy. to help humanity survive on this planet because the planet doesn't have a problem we always say we have to do that for the planet the planet will survive all those floods and hurricanes and things it's animals that are eradicated and we are a special kind of animal but we will be eradicated from this beautiful planet if we continue to do this. So it's for humanity we do it. It's not for the planet. It's for us, for our children, so that they can live in an environment that we have known.

SPEAKER_03: 18:23

I imagine that people that might be listening to this podcast, they might have been expecting to hear a lot more about EV charges and the design of the box and more conventional topics. But to hear the drive that's got you to this point gives, I think, people a lot of context as to what's coming next. And to hear that people like yourself and other people at Smappy are thinking that far ahead about projects that are going to make big changes in the future is an exciting thing. So if we just shift

SPEAKER_02: 18:53

speeds for a second. Obviously you're based in Belgium and that's a starkly different environment when it comes to electric vehicle charging than what we have here in Australia. At the moment there's less than 1% of the vehicles on the road in Australia are electric vehicles based on some figures that I've seen that Belgium is at 4% now for electric vehicles on the road and that's up to 16% when you include hybrids. And if you look at the percentage of new sales, it's much higher than that as well. So I guess in a lot of ways, Australia could be like Belgium in 2017 or 2018 or something like that. So can you give us a bit of context in terms of how the growth has played out for you over the last five or six years in the industry? What sort of things have really driven the uptake of electric vehicles vehicles for consumers and what sort of things have you had to really focus on with Smappy?

SPEAKER_00: 20:00

So I think the first thing that is present here is the cultural aspect. Is it okay? No, we have many petrol hits that I hate them when they say, well, range, does it work? Is it efficient? I mean, I So now to the petrol, that's what I tell them. Even if you would produce electricity with gas in a power plant, in a power plant it has 60% efficiency. An electric engine has 95% efficiency. That means that 95 multiplied by 60, you're using, let's say, 55% of gas to get the gas to the wheel, well to wheel. If it's gas in your car, the best combustion engines are 30, 33% efficiency electric is 95 96 percent three times more effective efficient so just from that point of view we need to go there it's cleaner it's easier it's you can do everything with electricity you know no way i think they are at 70 percent of all cars being electric i don't know the exact figures but it's in that and out of the the new cars I think 9 out of 10 are electric. So how did it happen? With subsidies. So it made it cheaper. It's still more expensive, but it made it cheaper. What I'm always saying also to enterprises, the TCO, which is the total cost of ownership, is better on electric. If you have solar panels on your roof, and your employees drive electric, you charge them at the office. You pay almost zero for the fuel. I mean, the electricity is made from your roof. Imagine your amortizer after four or five years, your electricity production. All the years after, it's free energy. So you drive free. You don't have to pay for the fuel. So if you look at this, and the reduced maintenance on electric vehicles, you don't have a gauze exhaust, you don't have an air filter, you don't have... I mean, oil to refuel, to replace. I mean, it's just simple. It's electric. The TCO is better. I think it's pure business logic to do it. I am also even against subsidies. You know, even nowadays, governments are talking about subsidizing gas power plant you know what i mean it's we subsidize the solar industry to to reduce the cost so that people would do it now we have situations where we have wind and solar but we have some gaps and they think yeah we need those gas power plants to fill in the gaps okay uh i think it can be done with intelligence the virtual power plant concept that we have shifting consumption first reducing consumption as well use cars and batteries no they still think we need that gas power plant because we can turn on the valve well you know turn on the valve, there's another guy, Putin, in Russia, that turned the valves in the other way and shut us down with the gas. So we still have a geopolitical risk. With nuclear, yeah, we also have a geopolitical risk. Wind, solar, no risk. So as an economy, you don't pay for the wind. You don't pay for the solar. You pay for gas. You have a geopolitical risk for gas. The same for nuclear. So go to that. Make your economy productive. help as entrepreneurs as population to go there let us transition to a full full full renewable based economy it's cheaper it's very important that our industry can have access to cheap energy and that will happen and those governments then say we need to go to nuclear well I advocated as well 15, 20 years ago that we need to go to nuclear. There's no CO2 emissions. And this is well contained. But the thing is, it takes 15 to 20 years with permits, with building, with having it safe and operating those things. So too bad, too late. The only possibility is wind, solar, with intelligence where we consume, that we adapt to the availability, and electric cars.

SPEAKER_03: 24:56

The conversation around nuclear and also fossil fuel projects is particularly relevant in Australia, where exporting of fossil fuels has been a very important part of our economy for a long time. And there's a lot of talk. from the opposition party at a federal level, not from the current government who's in power, leaning towards nuclear. Every few months we read about the government weighing up the options about opening a new coal plant or gas fields, but like you said, the reality is by the time these projects could come to fruition, vehicle-to-grid and distributed power is going to have advanced so much that we will not need those enormous fossil fuel resources.

SPEAKER_00: 25:40

If I may say, I really believe in the nuclear fusion technology, S-U-N. Yes, the sun. What does the sun do? It's a fusion reactor. It's taking two hydrogen atoms. It's fusing them to helium. And you know, this is free. it's at millions of miles away it is safe distance and actually there is a fantastic invisible grid that doesn't hurt that doesn't pollute the environment with cables there's cables from that nuclear sun reactor going to everybody everybody can have that free energy you take something called a solar panel you put it in the sun and it converts the 1000 1500 watts per square meter that this energy from those photons coming that is a byproduct of diffusion those photons light energy waves come they hit a panel and they convert 24 percent of that 1000 watts per square meter and you get 240 watts electric there's no pollution it just hits the panel you put the panel anywhere you have those invisible hidden cables everywhere how simple and nice is that how stupid is it to do the other thing to start to try to invest and build and concrete and things to set up a power plant that is available at a safe distance working for us free and you know The total amount of terawatt years per year, I mean the total amount of energy that we all consume in industry, in homes, on the whole planet for all applications, so transportation, everything, and all forms and fossil and nuclear, total big number. Well, that number that we use in a whole year, is provided by the sun in just eight hours the radiation the watts per square meters of the surface of the planet that amount of energy during eight hours because what times hours is what hours is energy the quantity so a quantity of that wattage that we get from the sun in eight hours is the same quantity as all the energy used by everybody and all forms on the whole planet for a whole year so how stupid is it to think that we should do things differently it's it's obvious no Anyway, I'm too opinionated, maybe.

SPEAKER_02: 28:39

Yeah, I think it's a really, really good

SPEAKER_00: 28:42

point.

SPEAKER_02: 28:44

Yeah, I think there is also a pretty key advantage of where we're headed in the future with solar and wind is the fact that at the moment, you know, for these People who own these solar assets, curtailment is a big issue. But the only reason they are curtailing is because they can respond very quickly. So if we think of the history of energy creation, it's been traditionally through coal and nuclear, very early. low assets to respond to anything in the market. So if you want to turn off a coal generator and turn it back on again, you're talking about weeks. Whereas if there is instability in the grid or volatility and you need something in the generation side to change, the huge benefit of the future we have with solar and wind is that, particularly with solar, it can respond in a matter of seconds. And in the future with interconnected batteries, that can be a matter of nanoseconds. So the ability for us to have a permanent, a much more stable grid with renewable power is quite clear, even though the current rhetoric around renewable energy is that it's an intermittent energy source and it can only provide part of the power. But I think that is something that's quite often overlooked.

SPEAKER_00: 30:11

Well, you know, I mean, it's true. But we can control the demand side of the energy also in fractions of a second. We have over hundred thousands of assets, charges we manage on our platform, Smappy charges. With a press on a button on our system, we can really engage hundreds of megawatts by reducing If you are short of 200 megawatt, I press a button and I reduce the power instantly for those charges that are actively charging. So we have that power already today in this MAPI platform. And when the cars will be able to feed back, it's even better. Gentlemen, I have a time issue because they took a lot of time. Or maybe you have a last question?

SPEAKER_03: 31:07

Well, we have questions that could take us the six hours to get through. This has been fantastic, and we've loved getting a perspective that I think is very different from some of the other guests that we've had on. We really appreciate that. For us here in Sydney, it's 9 p.m., so we might wrap this one up, but if we could find a time in the future, it would be fantastic, and I think the audience would also love to hear a bit more.

SPEAKER_00: 31:28

Okay. It's my pleasure. Looking forward to podcast two. Thank you so much

SPEAKER_03: 31:33

for your time, Stefan. Yes. Bye-bye, guys. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02: 31:43

so that's it and thanks for listening to this episode of the ev charging podcast brought to you as always by solar choice australia's only instant quote comparison service for solar ev charges heat pumps batteries and air conditioning systems we also provide independent consultation on and tender management for clean energy projects in commercial and strata buildings with over 17 years of experience find out more at solarchoice.net.au and stay Stay tuned for the next episode in

SPEAKER_03: 32:16

two weeks. If you think this is the best podcast you've ever heard in your life make sure you share an episode and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app.