Wolfe Power Club Podcast

The Philip Steele segment offers genuine technical substance on heat pumps, microgrids, and tariff mechanics, but the DTEK interview is surface-level and the host's lengthy, rambling intro eats significant airtime. The ratio of actual insight to filler and promotional framing is mediocre.

“a kilowatt hour of electricity will give you somewhere between three or four kilowatt hours of heat. So that spark gap is that multiplier.”

“the spot Gap goes the other way and actually becomes cheaper to run a heat pump than run gas because you're using the combination of time used, tariff flexibility”

The framing of war conditions stripping bureaucracy as an accelerator for energy rollout is a genuinely interesting angle, and the Heater 'data centre on the side of a hot water tank' concept is novel. Most other content - distributed generation, heat pump CoP math, V2G - is standard industry discourse.

“one of the things that when you're in a terrible situation is it rips all the plastic off bureaucracy and you can get stuff done”

“That's a data centre on the side of a hot water tank. Data centers waste heat, why not use it?”

Maxim Simchenko is a legitimate practitioner - CEO of Ukraine's largest private power company executing a real deal under wartime conditions - but his interview is too brief to extract meaningful depth. Philip Steele is a credible hands-on R&D operator, not a thought-leader, though below C-suite seniority.

“we built the largest wind farm in Eastern Europe during full scale invasion, one of the largest battery storage system, 200 megawatt building within six months”

“We've got one Microgrid Life, gsa Thornwood. Um, now that micro grid is a new build site. It's mostly domestic, but 130 properties.”

Concrete numbers exist - €100M, 200 MW battery in 6 months, 130-property microgrid, 6p/kWh gas vs 25p/kWh electricity with CoP 3-4, API live since 2018 - but the headline Ukraine deal gets almost no structural detail (ownership terms, timeline, customer acquisition model) and key claims go unquantified.

“200 megawatt building within six months. It is impossible in any other part of the world”

“if the spark gap is like 3 or 4, if the coefficient is, is for, then you're more or less parity on the cost of running a heat pump against electricity versus gas”

The host is enthusiastic but routinely buries the question inside a paragraph of self-supplied answers, conducts no meaningful pushback, and lets the Simchenko interview end after three questions without probing the deal's mechanics, risks, or commercial model. Questions to Steele are better but remain largely confirmatory.

“I was talking to your team about some of the stuff you've rolled out in two years that would probably take 10 years in a G7 country. Could you tell our listeners about actually in Ukraine right now, why it is a good ground”

“Is that the real exciting thing that you think you could link four or five devices in people's houses from their hot water to their car power that essentially works with the M micro grid?”