What it Will Really Take for Renewables to Get to the Next Level ft. Hassan Shahriar (ADAPTR Inc.)

My next guest is Hassan Shahriar, who I had the privilege of working with a number of years back when we were in the renewables space. 

Hassan describes himself as a self-starter who leverages his technical knowledge and commercial expertise to guide teams through the multitude of challenges inherent in renewable energy projects. 

He brings over a decade of experience and realizing wind energy projects across Canada, projects that offset over 1 million tons of CO2 emissions every single year. Prior to founding ADAPTR, Hassan was responsible for wind turbine sales and contract negotiations at a tier one global wind turbine manufacturer. In this role, Hassan served as a commercial lead for over $800 million worth of equipment supply and maintenance contracts and was also instrumental in enabling the first large-scale wind diesel project in Canada at a diamond mine; a project that currently offsets the burning of 4 million liters of diesel fuel every year. 

In addition to his role at ADAPTR, Hassan serves in a voluntary capacity as the president of WindShare, a Cooperative which owns the Exhibition Place wind turbine located in downtown Toronto. At WindShare, Hassan is leading a new vision for the cooperative’s next chapter. Hassan has an engineering background, having graduated from McGill University with a Master’s of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering.

I always enjoyed speaking with Hassan and today's interview is no exception. 

I hope you enjoy this episode 

[Host: Lauren Scott] Welcome to The Resilience Report Hassan. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

[Guest: Hassan] Thank you Lauren, glad to be here. 

I'm so happy to have you on! To help set the context for our listeners, could you share a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today?

I could say that I'm one of the many individuals (a lot of the audience probably as well) who believes that we need to be better at how we produce our energy, a more responsible way for producing energy.

And I guess I'm probably a very fortunate subset, like Lauren, who has had the opportunity to actually act on it. We've had the opportunity to really shape a part of the electricity landscape here in Canada. 

My background is wind energy. I've been in it for over 10 years. Following that, I decided to found a company around cleantech which is called ADAPTR. That's what I do and so, you know, going forward from my professional perspective, I’m the jack of all trades - that's the life of an entrepreneur. With the belief that we can do something going forward for our future generations.

You mentioned you've been in the wind industry and cleantech for over a decade and it's gotten very popular (for lack of a better word) right now. Companies are getting very invested in terms of sustainability, but that has not always been the case. What was it that sparked your interest to get involved that long ago?

That’s a while ago! So if we're talking about what brought me to the renewables sector, it was a TED Talk by someone, well he was a boy at the time, called William Kamkwamba. If you have a chance, you should all check out his Ted Talk. It’s fantastic; it will give you shivers. So William Kamkwamba inspired me to pursue renewables really, and that's when it started off - that was probably 2007 or something like that. 

Then I got the opportunity to work in the wind sector through the company ENERCON. And for those of you might be interested, Lauren’s model right there (points behind host) is an ENERCON model.

Thanks for noticing! To get everybody on the same page, and you know ideally/hopefully we're going to have listeners from all around the world, can you give us a little bit of background as to the state of renewables in Canada, which is where your company primarily operates?

So I am probably going to have a narrow perspective on this, because, you know, there are so many things that are going on as it is today. 

Maybe one way to frame this is that renewables really started small, like any new technologies, back in the early '90s going up to the 2000s. But what really kicked it off was some of the motivations around policies and then those policies that were shaped by individuals that wanted to bring these new technologies into the ground as an option for power generation - they really made it happen. 

So the early 2000s mid-2000s, wind kicked off and very recently solar has been very, very competitive. The state of technology is optimal from the renewable technologies standpoint. Where we currently stand is that the technology has matured, the industry has gained a lot of experience and they have matured in terms of executing, technology has matured, the people have matured, the market policies have matured.

But the challenge now is interfacing and integrating all these of these maturities, and and how do they tie in with how our grid is currently structured.

Our grid was built 150 years ago. It was not designed for renewables, it was designed for something else. 

So the grid got more and more complex over the years for a different set of technologies and now they have to deal with - and I say they have to deal with because the new technologies are providing a new kind of value proposition - so the interface and merger areas are becoming more and more critical. And that is where we are today: we have very mature technology, great and competent people in the renewable energy space, we have a goal of a sustainable future (everybody agrees to it) but we also have legacy systems and how that energy is delivered to the consumers.

And so adapting that legacy system is going to be the most critical aspect on how we can move forward, and that's where we are today.

Would you say that that's the biggest challenge that the renewable space is facing right now, is how to connect into the grid? And, if not, are there other kinds of bottlenecks that you see happening right now?

And then, on the flip side, is the biggest opportunity you see right now that there's a genuine groundswell of interest in terms of these alternative forms of energy?

The biggest challenge, I mean if you look at what's going on in the States, there is a lot of potential for decarbonization. Because they're very coal heavy, there's lots of opportunity for decarbonization and renewables are hands down the best way to do it.

But the biggest challenge is that  - and I'm using the States as an example here - the biggest challenge they're now facing is the backlog of projects in the interconnection queue.

Basically you have proponents that come up and say “hey, I have this project, dear utility, could you assess and let me know how if I can interconnect?” The utility takes some time and then assesses all the potential projects that might be developed over that time frame and gives an answer.

But, by that time, there are other developers that have proposed new projects. So the interconnection queue is now super long, the cost for interconnecting renewables is super high, and so now you have this kind of slowdown of being able to deploy the most efficient generation systems that are out there. 

So that challenge exists for the US, because they're full on decarbonizing, but that challenge also exists here [in Canada] because the grid architecture is pretty much the same. And that's why utilities and system operators are thinking “wait, how do I mitigate the ability to incorporate more renewables?”

And so storage is becoming a big topic. Again, it's more of a reactive approach that we are seeing in the market, rather than a proactive approach. So storage now is being pushed because of the reaction towards the renewables that were deployed, but maybe we should be thinking proactively “what should we be deploying really to solve the needs of the next 5, 10, 50 years?”

Just a few barriers to overcome, and because I want to get our listeners to better understand ADAPTR and the work that you're doing there, could you maybe help explain two (I guess) bridge concepts that will get us there? One is that of hybrid renewables and the other one is microgrids? And maybe just assume that listeners might be coming from the renewable space but they might be coming from a completely different industry - so you might just want to level set the description there.

This is a tough one! We're talking about a very complex system that has been developed over decades. So the simplest way to think about it and and I've been trying to figure out for myself as well as I talk to my friends when they're like “Hassan, what do you really do? What is ADAPTR really all about?”

Here is the analogy that I've come to really like. So let's say you're going to the UK. You take all of your devices and your power outlets, plugs and whatever for your laptop. You go to the UK, try to plug in your two pin into the three flat pin. You can’t.

What if the only solution you have was to call an electrician to change out the outlets before you can plug it in?

Yeah, not not quite convenient.

It's going to cost you, I don't know, maybe 150 pounds and I'm going to go and do it next week. That is what happens when we propose renewable projects to connect to the grid. 

We do not have any means of adapting how the grid behaves with how a renewable generation system behaves. And so that interface, which exists in our travel adapter, like you know when we're plugging in a power outlet to a different country you have it right? That's the solution: you go, we buy it, plug it in, off you go.

But today that system does not exist in the power sector. That's what we are developing and that's what we want to make sure helps with that speed of transition. Because then you make it easy for the utilities, make it easy for the developers, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg for the consumers.

Well this really sounds like probably the genesis behind ADAPTR. Because it's not everybody who will go from an established career in a well-known company, I mean you mentioned ENERCON (it is very well known internationally), who goes from that stability to an entrepreneur, which I like to call an ecopreneur. 

So was it that gap that made you want to do the jump from kind of the corporate world over to starting your own business?

Absolutely. Because, you know, during during my time at ENERCON and I know I was fortunate to be involved in some of the more avant-garde projects like this Diavik Diamond Mine, which is a wind-diesel project and some storage projects, and so those were giving me insights on well, at the end of the day, we as a generator and also utilities as a distributor are means to an end for the consumers. 

We have to be ready to evolve; we have to be ready to adapt. So what do we need to do to really meet the needs of the majority of the consumers?

I think it's not enough to just focus on the subset of consumers that are more prone to an environmental benefit. To really have an impact, you have to be able to connect with the needs of the majority of the consumers. We have to stop thinking to ourselves “hey I'm just going to develop renewables”. No, it's “I'm going to provide a solution which is based on renewables but it meets all your needs”. 

So that concept really was what started off this need, and this approach of making renewables easy for the stakeholders is what prompted me to start ADAPTR.

Very interesting and I love that you gave that analogy of the actual adapter going to Europe. I can definitely frame it up in my mind and I'm sure our listeners can as well. Could you then elaborate a little bit further as to what the offering is of your company? So is it really that interconnection point from a technology standpoint between the grid and renewables? Any additional details that you can provide there would be great.

This is something I can share now because: there are many parts to it. There is the software side, and there's the hardware side. 

On the software side, what we do currently is we provide microgrid control systems. These are programs, these are algorithms that optimize different generations assets and also demand side. So this is nothing absolutely, you know, rocket science or cutting-edge. But, we're doing it in a way that will evolve over time as power systems evolve.

Because our power systems will change, our consumer behavior will change, the weather is going to change, everything is going to change. So our framework for these type of control systems is set to adapt itself, so that's one thing that we provide and do.

The second thing we focus on is, so we're helping communities/proponents deploy microgrids in remote communities. And these projects primarily are funded projects and the reason is that everybody's developing the wheel from scratch.

There needs to be ways of scaling this; scaling is a very big focus for ENERCAN and the federal government because he can you can't go about doing this large scale of all municipalities and communities/

So this second thing that we focus on is how can we help scale the development of these type of projects that's not just for renewables but rural communities, municipalities, your suburban neighborhood even. You could envision a way off scaling projects that just is not doable to do. So that's another area that we focus on: design and scaling.

It sounds like technology and the evolution of technology is going to play a big part in all of this progress and not just for ADAPTR but our communities overall. Are there any emerging technologies that you think might play an important role in this space, for example machine learning or by extension AI?

I have, so yes, there is certainly a role. So I have two thoughts on this primarily because I can't see the future but we can certainly look at similar systems in the past. One of the systems that I kind of tend to think about when I'm thinking about AI, and maybe the question back to you Lauren, is what application of AI are you referring to?

Well I guess I was maybe leaning more towards machine learning. That probably as we have these systems deployed for a longer amount of time, there might be an ability to, I don't know, project by pulling in multiple data points, grid usage overall, you're talking about brownouts: is there an opportunity for us to see if there is already going to be any peak utility issues that need to be taken into consideration. So kind of that predictive analytics slightly more elevated to that of machine learning and then potentially/eventually AI.

So my thought around it is this. Machine learning is very good at determining the picture of cats. Okay, let's take an example: put a picture of a cat, the machine learning algorithm has had enough data to recognize that this is the picture of a cat, makes the recommendation. If the cat was changing its look completely to look like a human being, the machine learning algorithm would not be able to recognize the cat anymore. 

Our power system is changing, so the ability for machine learning to be viable continuously in a very fast evolving system where different kinds of technologies are coming in, the user behavior and profile is completely changing that nobody knows, all overlaid by policy. It may be that, within a shorter time frame, you see some predictability, but that predictability is not guaranteed over the longer time frame.

Got it; so it might be appropriate in a short time frame but we're not at a place yet where it can really help in the longer term.

And then the challenge becomes, if you are looking at the shorter time frames, do you have enough data to realistically make predictions.

This is one of the reasons why, when we were building out our solutions for microgrids, we decided not to pursue completely a machine learning algorithm or an AI-based solution because you know if we're developing / supporting projects over 10 15 20 years then I have to say hey build us a solution in two year’s time because the system is completely different. That's where the adaptive approach is the approach that we have taken. It's a bit of a hybrid between knowing what the system is going to do and then employing machine learning where applicable. I think that's the most important thing: understanding where machine learning can be applied is as valuable as the solutions itself.

Very interesting. Also interesting is your timing of becoming an ecopreneur / entrepreneur. Can you share what it's like, what it has been like, over the past couple of years? So we've gone through a pandemic, the subsequent supply chain shortages, and then most recently a lot of geopolitical issues that directly touch energy. I would love to know how you've navigated this and even just, you know, ideas for others who are considering getting into the space of trying to kind of set out on their own for providing environmental solutions.

Hands down, our sector is lucky. We are a necessary industry (by we I mean power system / power sector) as necessary as healthcare. So in terms of disruptions, and I know based on colleagues in the same field on the generation side and the utility side, not much of a disruption except on the supply chain side. It’s not stopped, just slowed down, which only further identified the necessity of our sector. 

In terms of folks thinking about getting into the sector, absolutely. I mean energy makes the world run; it’s not going to go away.

Beyond your work with ADAPTR, you are also involved with a non-profit which is called the WindShare Cooperative. And for anyone who's driven around Toronto you might have seen a wind turbine that is within the skyline of the city itself. Can you talk a little bit more about this project because it goes kind of above and beyond what you're doing your day-to-day, but it seems like it's been a very important project to you throughout your time professionally.

Yes, and I would credit Wes Normington for getting me involved in this project. Wes, if you are listening, thank you.

I got involved in this project because it was approaching its end of life, and there were lots of important decisions to be made around what happens to the project. The co-op wanted it to continue, but during the pandemic, focus is completely separate right; everybody's focused on completely different things. My involvement in this was to make sure that the project gets to see its second life and we've been able to set the stage and the foundation for it.

There was a recent announcement. So the project was initiated by WindShare Cooperative, one of the first cooperatives for renewables. Just as a quick background, they started this like in the early 90s, the project got built in the early 2000s, and 2003 is when it was commissioned and the project partner with the utility in Toronto, Toronto Hydro.

So Toronto Hydro and WindShare co-owned the project and then, recently, we had a transition on ownership. We have a new partner come in, with Toronto Hydro focusing more specifically around the utilities side of things rather than an owner generator side. 

Well a very interesting trajectory so far. You did study mechanical engineering, correct?

I did.

So I'm very curious because I happen to work with a number of them within my industry: would you have any recommendations for either soon to be graduates or those even who are kind of mid-career mechanical engineers and thinking about doing a transition over towards the renewables sector?

It’s a very easy transition for mechanical engineers folks. 

If I think back, and this is only a sliver of a personal experience, I've realized that folks that do mechanical engineering through their university, they're exposed to a number of different areas so that they tend to be more versatile. That versatility is absolutely necessary if you're looking into the renewable energy space. So it's a natural fit I would say. There are a lot of mechanical engineers in renewables, so if you're in mechanical engineering, this is a good path!

We were talking off camera before we started recording and we were talking about how the genesis behind The Resilience Report is really kind of helping keep people stay engaged and motivated and trying to be involved even when the landscape can seem really heavy. Do you have any resources, whether it's an Instagram account or a blog or podcast that you listen to that kind of helps keep you engaged even when maybe the news can feel a little bit heavy?

So personally, I stay away from all of that. I'm going to share what it takes or what it has what I've learned over the past few years going on my own and and pursuing these ideas around ADAPTR. 

One thing is to learn how to fail. Failure teaches you how to do better next time, but it doesn't teach you how to be persistent. So I don't think any kind of social media will teach you how to be persistent. You can only find out by failing, that's the sad part. But that's the only way you can find out what's your level of persistence. And so if you want resiliency, you have to go ahead and fail rather than seek motivation. Because it's not motivation that's going to tell you what your level of persistence is and I think persistence is inborn can't learn it. 

Well, that's very fair and I think that just naturally takes us to our last question which I like to ask all of our guests, which is what you think it's going to take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward?

That's a tough one. So ultimately, it's people that run businesses. And forming a cohesive team needs everybody: all kinds of folks, all kinds of capabilities. You cannot have one type of person across the board. So in terms of building resilience, the ability to build a good team that can work well together is by far the most powerful thing that an organization can do in terms of resilience. And maybe, you know, to give that great team that you’ve built momentum, that ideology it's also important. Somebody needs to carry that flagpole. So two things: the flag bearer and build a good team.

Well I cannot wait to see what ADAPTR does next, and thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Lauren, really happy to be here. And everybody, follow Lauren’s other podcasts!