The march of AI and electrification have opened up diverse applications for storage and mineral companies. At RBC Capital Markets’ Energy Transition Conference, three players in different parts of the market surveyed the biggest opportunities, and the challenges faced by the European industry. André Burdet of Hitachi Energy, Matti Heitanen of Finnish Minerals Group, and Osprey Charging’s Monique Rodrigues trade perspectives on the fast-changing market.

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Welcome to Powering Sustainable Ideas, a podcast series from RBC Capital Markets where we speak with the leaders and companies powering the sustainable future.

The battery value chain has experienced an extraordinary few years, with demand and investment surging across everything from critical minerals to energy storage and EV charging. As the industry scales, the focus is increasingly shifting – from growth alone to execution, supply chains, and long-term competitiveness.

To discuss the opportunities and challenges ahead, RBC brought together leaders from across the battery value chain at our Energy Transition Conference in London this past June. In this episode, we’re sharing highlights from that conversation. The panel you’ll hear features Matti Hietanen, CEO of Finnish Minerals Group; André Burdet, Head of Hitachi’s eMobility business, and Monique Rodrigues, Chief Financial Officer at Osprey Charging.

Moderated by Paul Betts, Co-Head of European M&A at RBC Capital Markets, the discussion explores how different parts of the ecosystem are navigating the next phase of growth. Now, let’s dive into the conversation.

Paul Betts

So, I'd like to maybe start with a simple question. Be good to hear from each of you in terms of one, what excites you most about the future for the battery ecosystem, and also what concerns you the most.

Matti Hietanen

Thanks, Paul. What excites us the most is simply the, let's say, the scale of this, this industry, where we are heading, and the importance of the industry, because now it's not only about battery value chain anymore. It's about the energy transition as a whole, it's about the defense, security, and also geopolitics. Perhaps, if I need to mention one thing that worries is obviously the competitiveness of Europe and Western, Western countries as a whole. So, so we are obviously under a lot of pressure.

Monique Rodrigues

What excites us is the electrification of UK transport of all types. It brings about cleaner air, less pollution, better health, and we are excited about the growing uptake of electric vehicles. New vehicle registration of BEVs accounted 33% in December alone, the challenges is misinformation. There's still misconceptions, like there's not enough infrastructure to support the BEV uptake, but electric vehicles are here. There's already 1.7 million electric vehicles on the road.

Andre Burdet

What I would start with is, is always the same. You have a big hype, and batteries were the big hype 5, 6, 7 years ago. So, a lot of investment has flocked in. We have built up giga factories. Of course, the demand for batteries, as the capacity were built up, were not maybe where they should be. The EV market didn't grow as we were maybe expecting, even though now it's coming back. And the second thing is the hype has shifted to AI. So then investor went to another place and looking at AI. Now, what excites me today is actually it's a perfect situation with AI coming in, because, really what it means is that the entire industrial ecosystem is electrifying. If you think about AI, you think about robots, you think about autonomous trams or autonomous cars, industrial processes that will be electrified more and more. So, really, what happens in the market is that instead of having batteries for EVs, what you have now is batteries for everything, and I think in the midterm and longer term, that means demand is actually is going to grow going forward, in terms of batteries, because of many field of applications, and from our standpoint, it's quite exciting, because it means that you know those different batteries for those different type of application might be a little bit different, the chemistry you will use, the way you're going to package the battery, the way you're going to operate it is going to be completely different. Battery energy storage, maybe you don't need to have high power density, but you need to have low cost, maybe it will go to sodium. If you take, you know, EV charging, let's say EVs, maybe you need to have a high power density, maybe you want to lower the cost, so you're going to move towards solid state type of batteries, and so on, so forth. So, actually, at the end of the day, you're going to have different types of technologies needed for batteries to manufacture them. And now we see that we're moving to dry base manufacturing, which is very hard and solid state. So a lot of excitement there, but of course there are also some worries. The worries is that you have right now into the battery lifecycle market, we can see some stranded assets. There were a lot of investment done, and people want to get the return. You know, if we have three terawatt hour of battery capacity in the world, a lot from China, by the way, but also in Europe and U.S., is, you know, investor will need to have a return on those type of manufacturing or production facilities, which might a little bit delay investment for the new type of generation of batteries, which is, you know, dry base, solid state, and so on, and maybe that will a little bit hinder the evolution of the market from that standpoint.

Paul Betts

Everyone associates Finnish Minerals Group with mining, but you've got a much wider mandate. You've invested in battery manufacturing, battery recycling, and various other commodities to support the energy transition. How realistic do you think it is for Europe to become truly independent in terms of their battery value chain, given the dominance of China as it relates to mining, refining, and battery manufacturing.

Matti Hietanen

Well, obviously, it's quite hard. We are so, so much behind of the Chinese big companies and technologies. That is clear. On the other hand, I think that with right type of cooperation and also political support, we definitely should have all the capabilities to catch up and build these local value chains. I actually think that we must do that. It will be costly, it will be slow, but that is the direction where we should go. On the other hand, I think that we also need to do cooperation with the Chinese. As well, we have a joint project with the Chinese company. We are currently building quite a large battery materials factory, together with the Chinese partner, and I think that that is a good example that you can do very beneficial cooperation, where you can utilize their experience, and on the other hand to get the investments in Europe and strengthen the local supply chains, because obviously that production is then for the European market.

I frankly think that OEMs, and for example, in this case, like the European automotive industry, basically should clearly send a signal that they want local supply chains, they value those, and that they are ready to offer off takes, and even financing, because obviously for new projects it is always the key thing, and the first thing is to have the customer, and to have the off take, and even for us it's very difficult to go forward unless there is a clear commitment from the customer, so that is hugely important, and that is something where OEMs can play pivotal role supporting the whole creation of the industry and value chains.

Paul Betts

I think you're one of the only producers of uranium. Do you want to just quickly touch on that?

Matti Hietanen

Yeah, that is correct. So, yeah, we are the only uranium mine producer in Europe through our subsidiary, Terrafame. Uranium is a byproduct for us, which really can strengthen the local independency, and then the same goes, for example, with certain real elements, we are now planning the production of scandium as an example, and this, these like minor metals as well, those are quite seldom discussed in a public domain, but those are actually quite important as well.

Paul Betts

Moving back to you, Andre, you're obviously sitting at quite a fascinating point in the ecosystem. You see everything from grids to busses to trucks to charging. Where do you see the biggest bottleneck being for electrification today – is it batteries, charging infrastructure, grid capacity, economics, or simply consumer adoption.

Andre Burdet

Batteries, we know there is an overcapacity and oversupply in the market, typically LFP, but also other types of technologies. We reach, you know, sub $100 per kilowatt hour prices, so of course it still has a lot of influence into the TCO of a system using batteries, typically a car, but today we see cars, you know, going to the markets that are sub 20k Swiss franc. There is really, I would say, a rebound of the market, and the battery is not completely, let's say, killing the cost of the vehicle anymore. Of course, there will be technology advances into battery going forward, as I mentioned before. On the chargers, there are many, many companies existing out there, actually pretty much none of them are making decent profits today. We know that. And we would expect that there will be some market consolidation ongoing at some point. Then, of course, if we go a little bit further in terms of customer adoption, the customer adoption, there were a lot of discussion around range anxiety, but I would say today it becomes less or less an issue. Number one is because you have a lot of hybrids and people are moving to EV, and then they will do the next step, I'm sure, and second, the one that I'm using, like myself, I just tell all my friends, everyone, you know, I never had an issue on range, and the reality is that this is a lot about anxiety, but not so much about reality in my view, and for B2B operators, of course, they plan like busses, trucks, and so on, they have more serious planning, so it was never a big issue, so I don't see this a big issue. Economics, I would say it's quite obvious for everyone. I'm not revealing a secret here. The grid capacity is the big issue, You know, just to give an example, and I think we need to think about this, is if you have an electric truck today, long haul, you're going to have maybe a battery, let's say roughly 500 kilowatt hour, and you will have in a logistic site maybe 100 trucks, and you will have to recharge it every day because you want to maximize the capacity usage of your fleet, obviously, so you end up having to consume energy of 20 to 40 megawatt hour every day. You know what this means. This means a town of 1,000 inhabitants. So suddenly you have those mobility operators that, you know, they have to operate a small town, and before they didn't care about energy, really, because they have much, much less energy consumption in a logistic site. So then they, what they face is that we basically going to move from being a mobility operator into an energy operator. They will have to connect to the grid with high capacity, they will have to have permits, but they cannot connect to the grid because they're in competition with some other, they don't know how to get permits, and so on, so forth. In Hitachi, we are providing energy hub solution, but we have to help our client a lot to actually for them to get permit to for them to design the site electrification, and to have maybe alternative solution if they cannot get the power they need to generate power on site, or to have battery energy storage, which complexified the electrification side, so that's a little bit about the challenges that I can see.

Paul Betts

Monique, everyone talks about EV adoption, but I guess from a UK perspective, are we keeping up when it comes to developing our charging infrastructure? Are we, are we on track? Are we falling behind?

Monique Rodrigues

We're more than on track in terms of EV adoption, in terms of networks being built to match that. There's a common ratio always being referred to out there, and that's the ratio of charge points to electric vehicles, and it's a little bit of a misconception. It's not very insightful, because you've got a mixture of different types of charging that suits different needs. The biggest reality is it's about the opportunity and the growth. At the moment, we're seeing bigger sites with more higher charging being offered and better customer centricity that keeps improving.

Paul Betts

If you had one question for policy makers, what would it be?

Monique Rodrigues

Oh, more, and ask. One, cheaper electricity for public charging, two, relief on VAT for public charging, because we're paying 20 per cent compared to five per cent at home charging, and number three, we need permission to put up road signage for public charging. Three asks.

Paul Betts

Matti, we've seen battery metal prices fluctuate enormously over the last couple of years. You saw nickel and lithium soar, and then fall dramatically. How do you make billion-dollar-euro investment decisions given the volatility with commodity prices?

Matti Hietanan

That is a good question and indeed we have seen a lot of volatility, especially in nickel, that is our biggest product there, for example, there are a lot of also like political decisions which have a huge impact on the prices. And also it is not only about the like actual prices that you see somewhere, on the metals exchange pages, but also the like net payability that you actually get as a miner or as a producer. The delta between some kind of like intermediate product and refined product that can vary a lot as well. It can make like life difficult, if, for example, you have first thought that there is like a big, bigger premium, and delta for the more refined production, and then that vanishes. There is especially something that relates to these, as I mentioned, these like minor, minor metals, like Rio Telemans and Scandium, and then perhaps even uranium as well. So, now there is quite a lot of discussion in EU about price floors, and we have seen U.S. government showing example there. I don't think that that is perhaps suitable for bigger, bigger metals, like for example nickel, but, especially real elements and other like smaller market metals would definitely benefit from that, because, because it's very, as you said, it's very difficult to make long-term investment decisions if you're hesitant on the on the payback.

Paul Betts

Andre, we've heard a lot about EVs and passenger vehicles, but heavy transport is arguably more difficult to electrify. What excites you more over the next decade or so, is it passenger vehicles, trucks and busses, or entirely new applications like ports, mining equipment, industrial seats?

Andre Burdet

If you think about ports, it's quite interesting. Why? Because in a port, you have, you know, the ability, first of all, to… ports are going more and more into automated type of vehicle and operations, and the kind of straddle carrier they have, the tractors, and all of this consumes a lot of energy. So typically, in a port you're going to end up with an energy demand of 50 to 100 megawatt, typically, and you can imagine that suddenly, if you have to connect ports to the grid and consume 50 to 100 megawatts, it's like data center level. So, I think there will be a lot of excitement around the ports going forward. The issue in ports is what's the incentive for them to invest. They may not be deep pocket, they may be slim, so you need to, you know, have, I would say novel type of business model, maybe you need to organize for them asset financing, but of course you need to have the security of revenues there, and it's not, let's say, fully secure the way they will generate revenue under operation, because it depends a lot about, you know, trading, international trading, and so on. But I would say long term it's a very exciting element. The other exciting way is mining, because mining, you need also a lot of energy, without going to details, when you know trucks can be up to 400 tons, they need maybe eight megawatt of batteries, so this is like order of magnitude bigger than passenger cars or even trucks. It's really, really interesting. Electrification will be also at the level like ports. The issue on mining is not so much that the miners don't want to electrify, is that they still need to find the business case. Today they have like a return of, you know, in a mine, in a pit, you go down, you maybe use it for 10 years, a couple of years, and you move to another spot, so you have to move all the infrastructure, so, you know, they, it might be difficult for them to invest fully in electrified fleet, and then the electrification infrastructure around, you will need to find, will we are not developing some ways to be more mobile with assets for mining, so it will take a couple of years, but in terms of energy, it's like ports, it's like data centers, big energy consumption. The most interesting one now is really electric trucks, because trucks are now OEMs. And for those trucks, as I said, they have high-capacity usage because they need to monetize, so they will have, now that we are talking with logistic company that really have plans to electrify massively their site, so I think it's a very interesting area. And in those discussions, what you end up always with is, how can we maximize the monetization of the energy asset we're going to build? Because only securing revenues from our standard operation, maybe it's not enough. Why? Because they have a lot of energy on site, they connect to the grid, but they will probably, a lot of time, use battery energy storage, and then you start talking about energy monetization through trading, for instance, or working with your local, let's say, ecosystem partners, how you can actually maximize the monetization of this energy by cost, using it in a virtual power plant, or things like this. So, I think the excitement is there, and overall the direction to me is from massive electrification is energy hubs concept and business model associated to it that flies for everyone.

Paul Betts

And I guess from an investor perspective or a return on capital, where do you think investors are most underestimating the opportunity?

Andre Burdet

Back in January between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Bank, we have signed an overall global agreement to look at financing assets for charging infrastructure, and now we had also some project where we applied this model, for instance, in the UK with First Group, and where I would say that there is a need is really this kind of SPV vehicle that you can build up to finance assets on behalf of commercial operators of buses, for instance, and trucks, so buses and trucks. Why? Because those operators, as I said before, their competencies is not in energy assets, this is in fleet management and managing their fleet, and sometimes either that they let's say they don't have the cash, or rather, they rather they don't want to use their cash for those energy assets, but to continue on their fleet to do the transition, and therefore you have an opportunity here for investment into those kind of SPV-type of model for energy assets that we apply.

Paul Betts

Excellent. Thank you. Monique, just in terms of going back to EV charging, I think consumers are obviously looking for charging to be as simple and reliable as filling up with your car with petrol. How far are we away from being able to experience that today?

Monique Rodrigues

Paul Betts

And in terms of the challenges associated with that, you see, technology or grid connectivity and planning being the bigger of the two?

Monique Rodrigues

Technology isn't so much of a challenge anymore. To build on what Andre had said previously, the physical charge point hardware is becoming more reliable, cheaper, higher capacity. In terms of software, Osprey have built our own software back office that we use to then manage. We continue to invest and to innovate, so that we can control that customer experience. And in terms of grid, the challenges have been managed, but I think the key is in having an experienced, skilled team that can manage these challenges in house.

Paul Betts

Matti, you and I know well, a mining project could take 10 to 15 years to develop. Does Europe have the urgency required to build these projects?

Matti Hietanen

I think that it's clear that we don't have that sense of urgency that is needed, because this whole future of demand will probably be much more, like larger than what is understood currently, and for example, up until today throughout our history we have mined a little over 700 million tons of copper, and now throughout the history, basically, just in order to maintain this economic growth, we need to reproduce that same amount in next 20 years. So, the need for raw materials is going to be huge, and there will be a problem, because obviously, basically, most of the best assets have been used already, and every time when you now open a new mine, typically the crate is lower and is more difficult to extract and utilize. Costs are increasing, and that is a problem.

Paul Betts

Andre. If you double click on the battery value chain, where do you think the biggest value creation will come from over the next decade? Will it be mining, chemicals, battery manufacturing, charging software, or grid management?

Andre Burdet

I think there will be value creation all across those things, but in different manner. From a battery perspective, I would say in very simple terms, there is a big move, of course, to move from wet- to dry-based manufacturing and solid state. Especially for the EV, it will be very important, because this will improve safety, of course, but decrease cost and things like this, so I think that there is a new race in battery manufacturing for those new type of technology from how you process. On charging, yeah, I mean, I think the big things will be MCS technology, megawatt charging, but that will be most, not so much for the passenger car, but really for trucks and other type of application. The MCS technology will come, but I think the issue will still be the green grid constraints, of course. So, talking about grid constraint, what I really see is that paradoxically, it's not a technology question. The biggest thing on what I call the energy hub, so the way how you first of all connect to the grid, and/or manage the fact that you cannot get your power by having in-situ energy generation and battery energy storage, is really the I would say there are two main pillar is the digital platform that you're going to have, because you will have basically to manage a micro grid and optimize the revenues from trading, for instance, but also making sure the uptime is there for the operator, so the one that can actually design the energy hub and operate the energy hub in a let's say secured way will be actually really giving a lot of value, because that's really about ensuring the bankability of your investments. And the other aspect of it which goes parallel is new business model, because today companies that operate you know mobility assets whether it's a rail operator for instance, bus operator, truck operator, they will certainly not do it fully alone. They will need to have partners, maybe they will create specific investment vehicle for this. I was talking about SPVs before but think about who comes with the right business model in order to accelerate this transition on the energy side. So, those are some of the elements that I see.

Paul Betts

Excellent, great. We're nearly up on time, so I'll just ask you, Matti, quickly, if you do agree with that, or do you have a different view?

Matti Hietanen

I would say still that, based on the evidence that we have today, I would say that mining is probably one of the one of the areas which will do best, and I'm not saying this because we have assets there, we have assets elsewhere as well, even in battery, but it seems that is probably something that will do fine.

Paul Betts

Monique, are they both wrong?

Monique Rodrigues

I think they’re both right, and to build on what they've said, we in the EV space are hugely excited about batteries improving all areas and everyone's lives, and for charging, specifically, batteries can be used to manage the grid where we don't have enough grid capacity or storing the capacity, and then when you've got your peak prices to then use from the battery, so it can help us with our margin, and then, of course, that's return on investment, and passing that also on to the customer to bring down the cost of public charging. So, batteries are huge for us as well. Timing is important. We don't want to be, as CPOs, pioneering this space. So, I really love your idea about the SPVs, because it's not something that we specialize in yet.

Paul Betts

Thank you. We are up on time, so we'll leave it there. But appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and join us. Thank you.

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