Lodestone Energy's IPO, explained

And what are some of the ways that you make that low cost? What are some of the levers that you pull that perhaps those four big gen tailors that you mentioned can't do?

Well, we've specialized on a particular size of plant.

And we worked out a number of years ago that the electricity grid is broken up into nice bite-sized pieces of about 25 to 35 megawatts of power.

And a small town would use something like that amount to supply themselves.

And so we specialize on this size.

We worked hard to be able to do them quickly so we can build two or three of these farms a year.

And if we can build two or three of these a year and locate it at these locations where the size is well matched, then we can get good at it, you know, become kind of the specialists at that size.

And then the interconnection costs are also as low as possible.

That sort of localised offering is quite interesting.

If there's sort of any word of the year, I think it's resilience and that's something that we're constantly hearing about.

Does that make potentially those local communities more resilient of sort of building these localised infrastructures at that community point?

Yeah, I mean the electricity grid is broken up in a way where a generator that makes its power in a distributed sense will be able to lower the price of electricity wherever it goes.

And so the market rewards people to locate near where consumption is.

And so the first thing we do is try to bring the power price down in a given area.

And then the second thing we do is try and think of how do we create resilience in that local area by potentially adding battery capacity, effectively turning the town into an equivalent of putting solar panels on the roof of your house.

And that's our plan.

It's a big plan.

Each one of those is sort of a $50 million type investment.

But we are dealing with trying to offset a town and make it kind of in the daytime, at least, off grid.

It's really matching that demand and supply at that more local level, isn't it? It sort of reminds me back to Economics 101, university days, but it really is sort of that simple.

Exactly right.

All the electricity generation in aggregate, every half an hour, matches demand in the whole country.

And then our role is just to try and do that at a very small, isolated area at a time, one at a time.

When I'm at home and I'm turning the light on, that's quite a simple task, but clearly there are a lot of different participants at play there in terms of you've got the generators who you've spoken about, some of them, you've also got the grid operators, you've got the electricity retailers.

Can you talk a bit about those different participants and where you might see competition and where you might see more of a partner?