“Modern smelters fitted with EnPot modulation technology can maximise operating performance and reduce their CO2 emissions profile by flexing their energy use to match electricity generation fluctuations”, Karyna Young, CEO of EnPot

We are glad to have Karyna Young join us at LeaderSpeak 2022, a Chief Executive Officer of EnPot since early 2021, after being involved with the company since its inception in 2016. EnPot is an innovative new technology that fundamentally changes the way smelters use energy to produce aluminium. It is helping the world achieve net zero emission sooner by reducing aluminium’s carbon footprint.
 
Karyna started her career as a commercial lawyer and finance company director in both New Zealand and Australia. In addition to leading EnPot, she is a CEO of Yunca Group, a manufacturing and engineering business and supplier to the global aluminium industry.

AlCircle.com: How is EnPot technology supporting the world to attain net-zero emissions? 

Karyna Young: EnPot supports the rapid uptake of renewable energy. Many countries in the world are accelerating their efforts to ‘green their grids’ by building more solar, wind and hydro generation. The issue is that renewable energy is variable by its very nature and therefore, unreliable. The unpredictable nature of new sources of variable renewable energy, particularly solar and wind, pose a major technical challenge for our power systems. As renewable energy increases, generation becomes less dispatchable and more variable so we need grid-scale solutions to balance electricity demand with generation. Of course, this is not an insurmountable issue. Large batteries and pumped hydro are two well-known firming solutions. A less well known option is transforming energy intensive aluminium smelters into flexible energy users that can modulate energy use on demand, at a much lower cost. A smelter that can offer critical demand-side response services to the grid enables greater uptake of renewables and in doing so, supports global decarbonisation goals.