Q&A with Team member from Angler
I had the plesure of having a 30 minute interview with a member of Angler solutions, Chad LaFitte, who has been working there for 2 years. I am hoping that some of the questions I asked will be helpful to others as well. Here are the questions I asked along with Chads answers:
- What role do you play at angler solutions and what do you do?
- How did this company take the first steps to the journey of greener energy?
- How does your team bridge conventional oil & gas experience with clean energy projects?
- How does Angler Solutions decide which sectors or technologies to prioritize?
- What sectors do you help with the most?
- What types of clients or partners do you typically work with?
- What’s been the most rewarding (or challenging) part of building something in Atlantic Canada?
- How did your company come up with the idea to develop MESO?
- How is it being used to support energy planning or investment?
- How do you evaluate project impact, environmentally, socially, and economically?
- How do angler solutions navigate and overcome any problems they run into while serving help to projects?
- What does success look like for Angler Solutions in the next 5–10 years?
- Are there any upcoming initiatives, tools, or collaborations you’re especially excited about?
- What advice would you give to someone looking to work in clean energy or ocean tech today?
At Angler, I lead the innovation and opportunity development across different sectors. So what that means is for opportunities, it kind of means trying to find new work for us. So managing proposals, communications with different clients, and also managing the delivery of projects that we've got going on. So I just kind of make sure that we're always chasing new work, where we're a consulting firm, we're always trying to keep the hopper full. And what we've got, you know, projects going on, we want to make sure that our clients are well informed with the latest status of where everything is. So that's kind of the opportunity side. And then for innovation, that's mostly talking about the miso and MSO tool that we're developing. So with that, it's an in-house modelling tool that we use for modelling different types of energy systems. And we've got kind of two teams in Angler. One is focussed on the software development side of that tool. And then the other is more focussed on the technical side. So it's kind of the engineering and the physics and everything that goes into it. So I managed those two groups, and it's a bit of an even split, between that and the commercial side of the business.
We were founded by the other Chad, in December, 2020, and I think around that time, a lot of people were recognizing this global energy transition that was starting to happen. So our founder (Chad) saw a local gap in that space for clean energy initiatives. He had just finished up with another company and he had some colleagues that were quite experienced in engineering and had a lot of strengths. So we figured we'd take those strengths from other industries, like oil, gas and hydro and then try to apply them to this kind of energy transition space. That's where he kind of was coming at it from. That was December 2020, so we're about four and a half years now.
One thing is modelling of these different systems, so if you think of clean energy, there's generally some kind of electricity being generated by wind or solar etc, and then that's used to do something. So sometimes it can be used to create hydrogen or it could just be used to feed directly into the energy grid. So trying to model how those systems interact with each other. And some of the economic parameters that have to do with those systems to say if it's going to be viable for a company to come in and build this whole concept, whether they're going to be able to make money from it. So we try to do techno-economic analysis. That means there's a technical component and an economic component, and we try to model these concepts and help them figure out how best to develop them. So that's something that we do in oil and gas as well, especially at a very early stage. We try to understand where the resource potential is and how best to economically develop. So we're doing a similar thing, but just in a slightly different space. I think one of the cool things is offshore wind projects. For example, it helps that we have an offshore oil and gas background for some of the technical components so you get a bit of carry over or overlap between the two.
It really depends what's actively happening in the different industries in the market. So we served. So for Newfoundland Labrador, three years ago, the wind moratorium was lifted, and a lot of companies kind of rushed into Newfoundland. They wanted to develop these onshore wind concepts. We obviously shifted our priority toward that at the time. It's really shaped by the client's needs, but also there's always these RFPs, which are requests for proposals that come up. They can come up through the governments or they can come up through different parts of the industry. So we try to respond to those if we think that angler can support those RFPs. there's like the client needs at the demand that we see happening, but then there's also the straightforward, the government has this piece of work that they want somebody to do. And we put in a bid on it type thing. So we kind of just keep our ear to the ground.
Renewable energy is one, so offshore wind, hydrogen. There's energy storage as well, which is like batteries or compressed air. And with that, it's important because the wind isn't always blowing and the sun isn't always shining, so when they're not, you need some way to store the energy for a long duration. So there's some pretty cool energy storage technologies that are getting popular now. And then other sectors, we also do a lot in ocean technology and kind of marine-based infrastructure. So we've done some work with the Marine Institute as well as some international clients. things like autonomous underwater vehicles. So vehicles that don't necessarily need somebody piloting them. They kind of control themselves. I'd say equally split between renewable energy stuff and ocean tech.
I'd say primarily we try to work with energy developers, so they're the ones that come in with plans and they want us to kind of vent those plans. so we do like feasibility analysis, model their energy systems, that type of thing. But we also work a lot with industry associations. Like Econext or EnergyNL, so that's the organizations like that, and also different levels of government. So a lot of the RFPs that I talked about, they either come from different departments of our provincial government or different departments of the federal government. So we end up working with different levels of government kind of indirectly at times. I'd say project's have a range from like that early stage feasibility stuff to more longer term executing projects and making sure things pan out the way they want.
I think rewarding is that there's a lot of strong political talent just as an example, we post a job, we'll get hundreds of resumes of people that are qualified for that role. So it's really difficult decision making wise, but it's also a very good side because you've got a lot of talent going around. There's a really supportive ecosystem here, for innovation. Both the provincial and the federal government do a great job of supporting startups and especially trying to build technologies that are made in Canada or made in Newfoundland, and they want to export those to the world. So it's good to have the backing of the government. Challenging I'd say it's probably like a smaller market here in Newfoundland and Labrador, so it's harder to scale things up quickly. But you're not necessarily limited to here, right? So as long as you have that lens on things, then I think you can get past that challenge.
We do a lot of work with these developers and they all want to analyze different concepts and see where it fits. So we do a lot of work in that space to begin with and when we were doing it a few years ago, we were kind of using Microsoft Excel and tools that we made ourselves to do the work. And then we have to repeat that for every different client and after a while you find where the gap is in software packages that are already out there on the market. We just decided, once we saw that gap for energy systems modelling, we would take the thing that we'd already made in Excel, and try to get some support from the federal government at the time, NRC and put a team towards building its own tool. So we kind of saw that the existing software, if there lacked flexibility, lacked some of the customized features that we wanted, and we figured we could make something better ourselves. And we also figured that if we create this tool and we don't end up selling it, at least we have it for ourselves to use in-house. But I think at the end of the day, we'll try to commercialize it. We'll try to sell it and see where that takes us.
We do techno-economic analysis, which is used in feasibility studies and a kind of upfront screening of projects. So we try to model things like system costs, energy balance, emissions, and we also model all the economic parameters that go along with systems. So basically trying to help companies make better decisions and try to make them early on in the process so they don't spend a ton of money and then have to change things before it gets built
Environmentally the biggest thing for systems analysis would be related to emissions. That's the one thing we can easily quantify. But also with that, and kind of with socially, there's social and community factors, especially if we get into like rural or remote areas. So we have to take things into account like fishing grounds for offshore wind or wilderness reserves, if we're talking about something on shore. Some communities currently run diesel generation and we've done some modelling where we bring in a wind turbine to offset some of the emissions of diesel, but with that, you might not just need wind. Like I talked about earlier, you might need some batteries or something for when the wind isn't blowing. and then what if that system fails? You probably still need to keep the diesel generator somewhere, just in case, as a backup. So building in all these different pieces of equipment, it's important to know how much space that's going to take up, how far away from the community it needs to be, for safety reasons or just from the perspective of seeing a big wind turbine on the horizon. There's a lot of different factors that kind of come into play and it's harder to quantify some of those. The easier ones to quantify are like the economic parameters. So the big one for us is levelized cost of energy. So you'll often hear that so many cents per kilowatt hour is kind of what you pay NL power for your electricity. Well, the companies also want to know how many cents per kilowatt hour is going to take to build something so that levelized cost is really important. And the net present value of a project is also really important. So those things are a bit easier to assign a number to.
We try to stay pretty adaptive and flexible so that we can kind of iterate on our answer. So we'll do an analysis once and modelling and kind of consider it as a draft. And oftentimes, we run that, you know, we do an internal checks to make sure all the parameters that we use are relatively accurate and then we'll usually have to go back and forth with the client to get updates and little tweaks on things. So we just try to stay adaptive in the sense that we can rerun those analyses and models just to make sure that we get the latest and greatest information. And we do a lot of stakeholder engagement as well. We don't do that ourselves directly, but we have some consultants that we hire when we need them to go out and do outreach to the community or indigenous organizations, whatever it may be depending on the project, and try to build in as much of that information as well. So that we're not using a rigid one size fits all, especially when you're dealing with renewable energy projects, you've got to be open to making changes and tweaks, just trying to stay flexible.
it's hard to say where things will go locally. I think some of the wind projects will go ahead, but for Angler, we want to grow our consulting practice across many jurisdictions. So we started offering services across Atlantic Canada, talking to different companies in Europe to hopefully tap into some of the markets in Europe and learn there are a lot more mature markets and bring that knowledge kind of back to Canada. So we definitely want to try to grow our consulting practice across different jurisdictions. And then for MESO, the product that we're making, I think the plan will be to try to launch that commercially in the next year or so and hopefully, it'll scale that software tool into different markets and maybe different applications. So there's kinda two branches of business consulting and MESO, and I think we're just going to try to grow those independently of each other.
We have a few potential projects coming up that are going to be very big for us. They're pending funding decisions right now, so hopefully we'll hear back in a few weeks. One to do with CCUS or Carbon Capture utilization storage. So that's a potential project that we're going to be doing with Memorial University and I think seven or eight other companies, It's a large one. So we're gearing that up right now, and hopefully we'll get the okay in a few weeks. And then just continuing to work with different developers in Newfoundland Labrador is really key to us. There's some pretty cool work being done in Western Newfoundland by some salt dome developers and they essentially have these underground deposits of salt that kind of form a dome structure. And you can actually remove some of the salt and it creates like this big cavern and then you can inject things into the cavern to store it for long periods of time. So if you make a lot of hydrogen and you're waiting for a ship to come by and pick it up, it would be cheaper to store it underground than it would be to put it in tanks on the surface. So things like that, new technologies that are still in that early phase, I think that's pretty exciting and something that we hope to stay involved with over the next few years.
I think in terms of systems and trying to have a higher level view on how all the different pieces fit in. I went through engineering school and I found that when I graduated, I had a lot of technical knowledge built up, but I didn't have a lot of strong communication skills or like the softer skills. So I think it's good to try to keep a balance. If you want to work in energy or Ocean Tech or any kind of technical industry, I would say it's good to have, you know, a balance between technical and interpersonal and kind of soft skills as well. So it's good to keep a focus on those things. Probably most importantly is to try to follow the trends that are going on internationally or even in Canada because if you kind of see the way things are going to play out, then you can kind of position yourself to be in the right place at the right time. And I think timing is very important when it comes to career growth. So that'll let you focus on the right subjects in high school and through university and college and whatnot. And just try to keep like a macro lens on everything that's happening, that kind of helps guide you.
Interview End
These are all the questions I had asked to the contact from Angler solutions. These helped provide me, and anyone using this website, some inside information that is not readily available through research.