BP

Ben Parsons

Things Ben Says on Podcasts

“They have this brilliant line where they say standardization of spare parts is more valuable than money in Ukraine. Because with standardized parts, you can repair anything, any part of the grid. You can swap components in and out and move things where they need to be. That was more valuable to them than the money to do it.” — Ben Parsons, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change “There's a very good argument, actually, to say that if you can run a system on variable renewables that have intermittency, that's a security feature, not a flaw, because it forces you to think about backup and redundancy and how you ride through outages, because you expect them and you model them. What you don't expect and you can't model is geopolitical crises like a war in Iran.” — Ben Parsons, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change “Around 50% of their centralized coal and combined heat and power generation has been taken out through Russian strikes. But only 7% of their distributed generation. So you can see how that very centralized Soviet architecture is remarkably vulnerable.” — Ben Parsons, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Where to Find Them

Ben Parsons has been a guest on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change .

Recently: “What’s The Cost Of Being Unprepared? | Deep Dive Ukraine 05: Ben Parsons” on Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change (November 2026).

What They Said

“They have this brilliant line where they say standardization of spare parts is more valuable than money in Ukraine. Because with standardized parts, you can repair anything, any part of the grid. You can swap components in and out and move things where they need to be. That was more valuable to them than the money to do it.” — Ben Parsons, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Parsons is quoting a report by a Kyiv think tank on how Ukraine keeps its grid running under attack. The point is that being able to repair grid equipment quickly matters more than funding.

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · 2026-11-09 Permalink → Listen →
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change Around 19:50 into the episode
Ben Parsons

…flexible assets that can respond very, very quickly and help them reroute power and change how the grid operates. Another really striking thing is something like standardization. There's a brilliant report by Dixie Group, and we can put it in the show notes that talks about lessons from Ukraine. So

Michael Liebreich

just for clarity, Dixie Group think tank based in Kyiv doing lots of work around the economic challenges associated with this conflict.

Ben Parsons

That's right. And they have this brilliant line where they say standardization of spare parts is more valuable than money in Ukraine. Because with standardized parts, you can repair anything, any part of the grid. You can swap in and swap out components and move things where they need to be. That was more valuable to them than the money to do it. Fascinating.

Michael Liebreich

Yes, and of course, standardization is kind of hard when a large part of what you're doing is living off donations. Because, okay, financial donations, you can buy what you want, although you're in competition, of course, with data centers and all these other people who want transformers and cable…

Ben Parsons

And this is where we've got this opportunity because we're not at war. We're not in the same active conflict that Ukraine is. We have the luxury of peacetime to really think about this properly. And none of this is new. So your friend Amory Lovins, that I know has been on the show, wrote a book…

Michael Liebreich

it's interesting. You went exactly where I was going to go. What is the cost difference? Because I've talked about if you build a big centralized power station, maybe you modularize it and maybe that adds, I'm going to guess, 5% or 10%, possibly, by the way, a lot less. Over a lifetime, including…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“There's a very good argument, actually, to say that if you can run a system on variable renewables that have intermittency, that's a security feature, not a flaw, because it forces you to think about backup and redundancy and how you ride through outages, because you expect them and you model them. What you don't expect and you can't model is geopolitical crises like a war in Iran.” — Ben Parsons, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Liebreich said talk of energy security has focused on price spikes and dark, windless winter spells. Parsons turns the usual criticism of intermittent renewables around.

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · 2026-11-09 Permalink → Listen →
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change Around 32:39 into the episode
Ben Parsons

…business strategy. But really what they're talking about is price security, is economic insulation from price shocks, which is important, but it's not the sort of physical, very technical resilience that we're talking about here. And that conversation is almost completely absent, it seems. So,

Michael Liebreich

…the so-called Dunkelflauter, the dark doldrums situations, which I try to deal with by saying, well, we just keep, you know, we just keep fossil backup. But I haven't had those. I haven't been leading those conversations about, well, energy security is a lot more than that until quite recently.

Ben Parsons

And there's a very good argument actually to say that if you can run a system on variable renewables that have intermittency, that's actually a security feature. Not a flaw, because it forces you to think about backup and redundancy and how you ride through outages because you expect them and you model them. What you don't expect and you can't model is geopolitical crises like a war in Iran. So, actually, whilst the conversation was all about how do you manage those Dunkelflauter periods, that's really helpful to think about.

Michael Liebreich

I really like this thinking. It reminds me of something that I heard about one of the big infrastructure providers for the internet. I can't remember whether it was Netflix or whether it was Amazon Web Services or somebody, but it was somebody like that that was running a lot of servers. And to…

Ben Parsons

There are some incredible memories, as you rightly say. We haven't talked about Chernobyl. I think you've got an episode on that coming out. So maybe let's not talk too much about it. But that was an incredible experience. There is nowhere else like it anywhere on the planet. And it has such…

Michael Liebreich

The visit to Musafia.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Around 50% of their centralized coal and combined heat and power generation has been taken out through Russian strikes. But only 7% of their distributed generation. So you can see how that very centralized Soviet architecture is remarkably vulnerable.” — Ben Parsons, Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Michael Liebreich asked how much Ukraine's power system has changed over the war. Parsons contrasts what survived Russian attacks and says Ukraine responded by putting flexible, distributed generation close to demand, a lesson he thinks Europe is ignoring.

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · 2026-11-09 Permalink → Listen →
Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change Around 17:30 into the episode
Ben Parsons

…not been an energy system, certainly a modern energy system anywhere in the world that's had to structurally change as quickly as Ukraine's had. Last year alone, I think they had 50,000 drones and 1,800 missiles fired at their energy system. I mean, that is just an extraordinary amount. It's

Michael Liebreich

amazing that they have any lights on or any heat flowing at all, really.

Ben Parsons

It really is. And they've had to adapt continually. It's been this constant game of cat and mouse. I think when we think about resilience, we often think about an event, a bad thing happening, and we have to recover. But Ukraine never gets the chance to recover. They have to continually adapt and reroute and find ways around the problem. But different parts of their system have fared differently. So, for example, around 50% of their centralized coal and combined heat and power generation has been taken away. That's been taken out through Russian strikes. But only 7% of their distributed generation. So you can see how that very centralized Soviet architecture is remarkably vulnerable. And what Ukraine have done is respond by putting distributed, flexible, either gas turbines or renewables or batteries. And they've put that as close to the centers of demand as possible. And they thought about where there's critical load they need to keep running, have a much more integrated way of thinking about resilience and the architecture of their…

Michael Liebreich

It's things like the things that we could easily do. So for instance, instead of building one big power station, we could make it modular. But when you make it modular, you might also want to think about separating it distance-wise and also putting infrastructure, sort of concrete, what can I say…

Ben Parsons

we're now approaching this clean power investment we're doing in the UK, for example. And all across Europe, we're doing our energy transition. So in the UK, I think it's around £40 billion a year we're going to spend on energy over just the next five years. And those investments will lock in the…

Michael Liebreich

just for clarity, Dixie Group think tank based in Kyiv doing lots of work around the economic challenges associated with this conflict.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Climate & Energy