From Founding Fluence to Gigawatt Projects in Saudi Arabia | Marek Kubik

People:Marek's LinkedInMax' LinkedInKeywords: BESS, Fluence, Sodium-Ion, Saudi Arabia, Energy TransitionSummary:Marek Kubik was part of the founding team of Fluence, one of the biggest BESS companies in the world, and has been in grid-scale storage since 2009, for practically as long as the industry itself has existed. His journey started at AES, where he delivered one of the world's first commercial battery projects at a coal power station in Northern Ireland, before scaling Fluence from a small Amsterdam office through hypergrowth to its Nasdaq IPO. Today he is building renewable mega-projects in Saudi Arabia.In this episode of "BESSt of BESS" we talk about why the first grid-scale batteries had nothing to do with renewables, and how ancillary services, pioneering showroom projects and regulatory groundwork turned BESS into a commercial business. Marek also weighs in on how quickly sodium-ion will really become cost-competitive, why Europe may already have lost the battery manufacturing race to China and the US, and how Saudi Arabia went from zero to 18 GWh of grid-connected BESS in a single year.