How to measure system inertia - Modo: The Podcast (ep. 30: Reactive Technologies)

[Music] all right then so um what's reactive Technologies Chris reactive technology so the thing that we're famous for particularly in the UK is measuring inertia as we've seen the UK grid transition from coal and gas five generation which have these big spinning turbines they're very very heavy as we put more wind and solar we have a decreasing inertia on the grid we will say the control room back in the day was a bit like driving a steam train you've got this very very heavy machine that's burning a whole load of coal but it's very stable it kind of rides through faults um as it gets lighter and lighter it's a little bit like riding a motorbike lover seven so this is why we need faster frequency response different frequency response markets a different design of Market to catch that motorbike as it's falling and yeah our technology helps to measure inertia so we can tell a grid do you have a heavy grid today or do you have a Light Grid today how much frequency response do you need to buy so we're mixture of hardware and software platform offering cool and so reactive Technologies has been in the news a bit the various um uh well mostly good news really um you've raised a lot of money you've signed some big deals and you guys sell you know a lot of analysis and um cell information I think to grids like National Grid is that right yes our Core Business is selling data to grids exactly that like like this uh National Grid ESO is our kind of Lighthouse and uh first commercial customer in the UK we have a six-year agreement with them to give data to their control room so it's a data as a service kind of offering and now everything's like I love it yeah and we're now on that kind of internationalization Journey so we've done uh Pilots outside the UK in Japan in Germany in New Zealand in a couple of others there's only one National Grid in the UK so if we want to find another National Grid we have to go elsewhere and then coming later towards the end of this month we have an offering for energy Traders and for battery aggregators to take that same data source to take that same understanding of grid constraints that we give to grids and to be able to give that to The Wider Market forces they can understand and inform their bidding strategies cool and so um reactive technology is how long has the company been going for you've been around for a while in that company right yeah so I've been at reactive for five and a half years um I joined to run the grid business unit so five and a half years ago we'd done two Innovation projects with National Grid the first one was sending signals through the power system so we put a big load Bank okay great big toaster right in the middle of the grid and we sent the signal out across that whole grid and we could measure it in any plug socket so you're like modulating across the sign is it like is it yeah how how does that work so the way I was trying to explain it is think back to the August 2019 blackout yeah where people were stuck on tubes in London I don't think about that bit right yeah think about the the physics of the event so we had a yeah we had a one and a half gigawatt power swing yeah if the frequency fell really slowly that means you've got a really high inertia grid but the frequency fell really quickly and that shows us we have a lower inertia grid so we do the same thing but like miniaturized we inject five megawatts of energy into the grid instead of one thousand five hundred and we take the same measurement so we're sending this pulse of energy this five megawatts into the grid if the grid is really resistant to that signal then the amplitude's very low by the time we measure it that means it's a really high inertia grid whereas if the signal flies through the grid and it's really easy to measure you've got a really low enough I've got so many questions about this okay so so you guys inject pounds to grid correct a little bit with a certain waveform and then you measure it around in other places and then you figure out how heavy or light the grid is in inertia terms right yeah how do you don't need it you need to be meant like there's a Time sinking problem here over distances how do you do that uh GPS so GPS gives you a very very accurate timestamp so we have one location where we're sending the this this pulse out into the grid for the pilots we use load Banks effectively a massive toaster yeah very low capex but you wouldn't want to run that for a long time because you just make loads of heat by the way so people who haven't seen these things they look a bit like peaking plant they're like they're in um they're in containers or whatever yeah and it is literally just a sink of power you're just losing up power to heat the air usually it's exactly like a toaster it's a resistive element it's a wire that gets hot and a chimney to make the heat go away but no bread so but no bread just hot air yeah so great for a pilot and it proved the concept but for the commercial service we're using an ultra capacitor so it's a form of energy storage that's massively resistant to degradation we are sending a pulse of energy every two seconds roughly into the grid so we're going to full Imports then full export then full import then full export every two seconds and if you go to any battery investor and say hey I'm going to do that with your battery they'll tell you to go away because you'll have a small pile of Ash by the end of the year whereas an ultra cap super resistant degradation so we built a bespoke asset to provide this service to National Grid uh it will be there for the for the long term so we have a six year contract delivering this data from this asset and yes that's the model this is so cool so what does an ultra capacity the words Ultra capacity get me very excited okay what does one look like well it looks like a shipping container that says react Technologies but if you look on the inside if you look at the type of technology so Lithium-ion batteries are storing energy in a chemical form um an ultra capacitor is effectively storing energy uh like static electricity it's not two plates and you're storing static electricity on those plates is like when you rub a balloon on your hair you've got that static charge held on the outside of the balloon this is very very similar two plates you don't get that electrochemical wear when you have this uh sort of chemical change over time instead you've just got plates and you've got power shifting between those allowing us to give a hard and quick zap into the power system and it's actually the the biggest continuously operating Ultra capacitor anywhere in the world I love it but not probably not in the universe there's probably some aliens with mass Ultra capacitors somewhere the words it just makes me think about uh yeah Interstellar stuff yeah it's a bit something something a bond villain would have yeah it is it is and so who's in the company who are the bond villains um how many people are there and um yeah tell us about the company we've got 54 people roughly split 50 50 between the UK and Finland so everybody in the UK is from an electricity background so before I was at reactive I was at open NG doing demand side response and before that come from the world of consultancy and sustainability consultancy so everyone in the UK is from probably worth a mentioned you used to work with Robin who's uh Robin now yeah that's right yes we used to work very closely at uh open energy so well maybe we could talk about demand side response as well yeah yeah how this is going um so 54 people everyone in the UK broadly from an energy background some power system engineer some real like deep electricity expertise other half of the company in Finland is from a Communications background we have um real capability in digital signal processing we've got lots of EX Nokia Engineers I was going to ask you about one that there's a few Nokia folks yeah so we're based in a town called Olu it's about 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle so it's really far north in Finland which is where Nokia used to have their r d Center yeah and they're deeply deeply technical folks it's very dark in winter so they spend lots of time inside creating software and very high quality engineering I always say in Power Systems we sort of obsess over megawatts and Hertz and that's like our comfortable domain a telecommunications engineer obsesses over milliwatts and megahertz it's the same physics but it's a very different order of magnets and Fourier transform and forms and the the LaPlace all of this stuff right they obsessed by and there's plenty of problems that were sold in the Telecommunications realm many years ago that we're just encountering in Power Systems now so if you look at you know a very light power system be it Scotland or Australia you start to see oscillations so when you say a light remind us what you mean by a light low inertia lower inertia full of wind and solar makes it very light you don't have these heavy spinning machines that are creating that uh stability that we used to see for free um what is inertia what is inertia so if you have the the physics version of it it's measured in joules it's energy and it's the the spinning Mass uh in a in in a power system you can think of it in a in a very similar way to if you're riding a bicycle if you're riding a very big heavy bicycle or use the analogy of a steam train before if it's very heavy it has lots of inertia so if you're going down the hill and then all of a sudden you're going up a hill the very heavy bicycle is going to carry you quite a long way it's going to kind of ride through problems and we see that in the power system with frequency responsive I've got a frequency event if I lose 500 megawatts or so a high inertia system the frequency Falls very gently and very slowly a lower inertia system that's more like your lightweight carbon racing bike or it's moving from that steam train to that um uh to that motorbike it's a lot harder to balance it can be a lot more agile if you control it in the right way but you do have to control it in the right way so inertia is is literally how heavy a grid is it's how much spinning Mass there is on the grid and that amount of spinning Mass Gives it stability or not and the the um I guess the problem that we're trying to solve here is that spinning mass is uh generally turbines right it's steam turbines or gas turbines or yeah that kind of thing and that that was very useful um for the last 100 years on the grid because it kept good frequency and high inertia a very heavy system but um we were placing those Technologies with um wind and solar that are connected behind inverter so I all pass system that's right conversion power conversion units which are Electronics there's nothing big spinning it's um thyristors and things happening which is a different world um and so we we although we're getting the same megawatts we need to replace the other bit which is the inertia and um I guess the first thing to do that is to measure it where you guys come in so before you guys how was National Grid keeping on inertia or every so every grid globally basically has a a model of what they think the inertia might be so each of the big transmission connected generators are connected into their scar system they can see them in the control room and they'll make some assumptions about this has a steam turbine there's of this size and so I think it contains this amount of stored energy practice those generators can shift modes and bring different bits of Kit in and out so their inertia changes a bit but that's kind of okay there's also a load of inertia on the distribution grid so we have CHP engines we have in every single water utility there's a whole load of pumps moving water around which also provides Motors are inertia as well right if it's spinning whether it's generating about fans all this kind of stuff and in the UK about 30 of total inertia today is on the distribution grid if we decommission all of the coal and gas plant that 30 percent is going to turn into a 50 60 or 100 percent that's kind of embedded in the distribution grid we actually did some work in New Zealand and they said well we don't have any heavy industry you know we don't have these big spinning Motors so we think there's very very little inertia in the distribution Network the study that we did it turns out they have about 18 of their total inertia in their distribution group wow so even when they think there's you know nothing there we just have sheep and tourism we don't have heavy industry you know they still have big hydro plant they still have water utilities they still have I don't know pool pumps that people have at home and you've got this long tail of inertia and the only way to really measure it is this kind of injecting of power in the grid so we're in the strange position where our competition today is our customer yeah our customer has a model they're familiar with the model they kind of know the model and we're coming along and saying we know the grid better than you so what about the locational stuff can you see is there a way to figure out where the inertia is or is it you're just looking across the whole grid here's my inertia number I hope it's more complicated than this but um of course the whole grid this is how much nurse we have can you can you pinpoint where it is you know there's some in London and there's some in Scotland that kind of stuff yes you can measure we call it Regional inertia so you can kind of parcel the grid up into different sections and look at Regional inertia today National Grid aren't doing so much optimization on a regional basis yeah and they're kind of treating the grid globally the EU is doing a little bit of uh optimization on a regional basis Australia is doing quite a lot they are saying in each state has to carry a minimum amount of inertia because it's a long thin a grid and that's a risk of islanding so we can measure it regionally we put measurement units in the in in the right place on the power system to be able to parcel it up in that way so you can send one signal but then it propagates in different ways through these different regions to take those out to take those measurements so you guys seeing um are you seeing how to answer ask this question the right way so National Grid has changed how it support frequency response over time and we've had a lot more batteries provide frequency response so I remember back in when we were probably both working at aggregators back in 2016-17 there was um there was static non-dynamic frequency responsive static there was a lot of efr was just coming in yeah efr was coming in we had a lot of Pumped Hydro providing secondary ffr and now you've basically got subsequent batteries providing all of it so have you noticed a difference over time of inertia changing because of frequency response and all these batteries are so good so if you look at let's call it frequency performance there's kind of different time domains so inertia is really the first 200 milliseconds of an event so even the fastest battery isn't doing anything within that first 200 milliseconds it's probably taking that amount of time to measure what's happening before it can then take half a second or a second to respond so inertia itself hasn't changed but we have seen frequency performance changed quite always some battery Bots that can play in it this way because in in um in DS3 in Ireland you have to do four response in 150 milliseconds and the some fluent systems and and other systems out there that are doing it so there are some batteries that can do it but they're just not being utilized in that way in the UK that's very true and they do get close but when we're taking the measurements you can still tell the difference between inertia and frequency responsible yeah if you change how our signal looks you can excite the frequency response instead of exciting the inertia so you can actually kind of measure those two different things independently because frequency response is Rel relatively easy to measure and monitor we don't do that today we focus on that inertia bit that no one's managed to uh to to measure before but to answer your question yes you can see that that frequency performance change when we looked at Italy one thing that they've done is they've got really really fast acting response from an hvdc line and you could see it very very clearly when the hvbc line went down on the frequency performance just flowing appallingly in comparison a high voltage long distance transmission lines the high voltage Dynamic contain luminek I used to be an electrical engineer high voltage direct current lies right so they've got one between Sardinia and the mainland that helps with frequency performance particularly on the island go and check that out put some reactive Technologies out there and spend the week having pizza and pasta they're not bad not bad so what about internationally which which um which global grids are have got lots of a national which which need more of it and where are the problems or is it across the board everybody's got a problem and you're going to solve it all this is good business obviously very good business and the world I'd say you know has changed in the last five years let's say the picture from when I joined reactive Technologies the Mantra was high renewable Islands you know the UK is an islanded system we have DC links to our other countries whereas the EU is a massive massive copper plate so it's got a far greater sort of shared inertia over that system um so when I joined five years ago you know the Mantra was very much High renewable Islands so that would be you know UK including Ireland that would be uh Australia for example it would be ercot uh we talked about Urkel a little bit earlier you know although uh they're part of the U.S contiguous uh continent electrically they're completely islanded and uh actually when I went to the to the US and I did and and didn't know that Texas was lined up so why are they an electric Island and the guy just said because Texas Don't Mess with Texas sure do you actually know what it well it is I found this out so I think it's they wanted to avoid the Federal Regulation yeah there's a few reasons there's like some regulatory reasons also the in Texas um we're definitely going off topic here but here we go they it started as um production of ice so ice factories okay um got together and started a I can't what it used to be called um but they essentially they started a a group of these manufacturers and started sharing electricity connections between them before you knew it you had a a grid of ice manufacturers and it grew out of that yeah um and then since then you know they decided they wanted to just be their own thing the nucleus there's another similar one which is Japan Japan has a 50 hertz grid and a 60hz right why is that well in you know in Tokyo they were buying one set of equipment to do Osaka they were buying another set of equipment in Tokyo they were buying the British equipment in the soccer they were buying the US equipment and these cities were so far apart you know by horseback yeah exactly they thought you know these grids will never touch so it's fine that we're kind of building separate grids because they were building it for the the city without you know this Vision that these cities would eventually grow and become one you know huge megalopolis so you have a 50 hertz Grid in the north you have a 60 hertz Grid in the South and you have I think it's six different DC back-to-back connections to kind of join the grids and you have uh yeah one massive City that's Tokyo Osaka they also have that on the Metros though right you go to um yeah yeah if you go to Tokyo you can there's there's a competing Metro System yes Metro systems which again I love you know well we have that a little bit in the UK you know there's no multiple different Birmingham train stations in London we have a whole load of train stations when private operators built it but in Tokyo they've really taken into an extreme I love it they've got massive train stations right next to each other even with the same name in some cases which is brilliant um so anyway we digress yeah so um grids around the world generally islands and they've all got a few problems yeah so so five years ago you know it was definitely all about high renewable Islands um whereas the picture has just changed quite quite radically in the last five years you know we have discussions now with European grids where they're looking at everybody decarbonizing very very rapidly at the same time so this huge amount of inertia in this huge copper plate that they've kind of taken for granted for so many years uh will decline much much quicker you know we say in the UK we've had a fast Renewables transition but in reality it's been 10 years we've had some time to get used to it if we look at the next wave of Renewables rollout if we look at the speed of implementation of wind and solar it's going to be very very quick and I think it's going to be very hard for a lot of grids to keep up and to not be the bottleneck exactly that's going to become it's going to become very very politically unacceptable for them to say no you cannot connect or yes you can connect but I'll constrain you for half of the time this is not something they'll be allowed to do so they're really having to kind of push and look at the next generation of techniques it's mad that humankind always gets tripped up by um Steve adoption S curves of technology and they get steeper it feels steep now right oh you know we're building some some offshore wind right it's gonna get faster and these grid issues are going to get faster same with the the energy crisis right now in the Decades of under investment we're not going to go down that route um but yeah very uh always catches folks out and no one's a mutant none of us are immune to it you know I'm surprised about every day um so come back to your product or products reactive Technologies has a few different products do you want to just talk us through um what they do so the first one is measuring inertia I think we've I think have we done that one does it have a cool name that's the most important thing the overall product for grids is called grid metrics which is grid metrics inertia measurement does what it says on the tin right metrics with an x on the end I hope that's correct excellent excellent so the the the main service and kind of the core of our business is offering uh these inertia measurement services to to grid operators transmission grid operators most of the time we also have services for distribution grids and we have a growing kind of portfolio of those globally that's measuring system strength so if you think of inertia as the stiffness of the frequency it's kind of how my frequency is stable or not system strength is the stiffness of voltage and distribution networks don't really care about frequency today I really really care about voltage and keeping that within bounds and it's a similar relationship with Renewables we have a declining system strength with more and more Renewables a grid the spinning masses to prevent a whole new language to describe this stuff to non-engineers right about you know strong weak heavy light Kudos yes and then last but not least we have this upcoming service launched at the end of this month for energy Traders for aggregators for uh potentially for asset owners to also get the same grid Insight so to understand the amount of inertia on the grid which should inform the volumes of dynamic containment that will be bought um the other thing that we offer is event detection so we've got these very very very uh accurate time stamped measurement units which are taking 48 000 samples of data every second which is a lot of data but we're able to detect Power Station stripping and we're able to do that before Market remit notices so potentially Traders can get a real insight and they can start trading ahead of remit notices coming out and because we're doing that by measuring frequency by measuring public data it's an absolutely kind of acceptable way to to inform your trading strategy and to try and get an edge you know why I love this company that your company right I love this conversation it's because it's almost like a reductionist approach to if we get philosophical about it okay reductionism and approach to electrical systems and really a settlement period is a cycle if you go down low enough I know there's a lot of challenges about that yeah maybe you're a couple of Cycles you know in a moment it's 30 minutes or it could be five minutes or it could be either a future or half yeah when you get far enough down on the 50 hertz cycle you're not going lower than you know 50 times a second yeah and I really like the fact that we're as a as a as an industry we're starting to look at this sub second stuff in detail then for us it came from those Finnish Engineers it came from that telecommunications mindset um you know I remember when the efr requirements came out and there was second by second metering and everyone said oh second by second that's loads of data it's really really fast and responding within a second it's incredibly quick and if you speak to a telecommunication engineer that built video conferencing software they would tell you a second is a very long time it's a very long time for someone to wait and have that kind of satellite delay effect they live in this realm of microseconds or you know going into nanoseconds so it's that comfort zone and it's it's looking through the looking through the lens you know I talked very briefly about you know systems get light and you get oscillations I mean telecommunication Engineers call this an echo an echo on a phone line is really annoying an echo cancellation is such a known technology and it's very very well understood but we go in Power Systems oscillations are happening inverters are kind of bouncing signals off each other there you go okay it's quite easy to tune out yeah maybe let's start looking at this and audio Geeks as well audio Geeks abusive stuff as well yeah it's uh it's very very cool and I'm glad someone's doing it um and so who are your customers you've got National Grid you got the grid folks um and then also you're now working with dnos but have you signed any deals with dnos are you doing Pilots we're doing Pilots there's none we can talk about publicly yet but there's a cup there's a couple in the uh a couple in the states so we're on this internationalization journey we have an office in Melbourne so I think Australia will be a real hub for us um they've had a blackouted 2016 due to low inertia very very interesting energy Market we have an office in Dubai if you look at the the grids in the Middle East they are decarbonizing incredibly quickly like they're going from naught to 100 very very quickly and they're looking at all sorts of other technology Investments they can make alongside that and then we have the US and the US is a very very different Market structure and some of the dnos are actually very very forward thinking over there and really want to start trying to understand the strength of the grid where they don't have any visibility and the strength gets particularly low when you have like a really rural area with long lines and you put a load of solar on it because the UK is relatively small we actually don't have too much of that we do have some voltage issues but it's a sort of bigger order of magnitude in the states so we're seeing a big take up in the states with this DNA offering and um the do you guys have intellectual property and I saw um there's a press release you guys raised quite you know 15 million ish not too long ago um let's talk about the company for a second so what's up what's the what's the vision um and I know you've got a lot of technology is that is that protected you know what does the future look like for you guys yeah we we have 200 patents uh which is good going for 50 or so staff to keep the patent to staff ratio nice and high yeah uh I did not found the business the business has been going for around 10 years there were two co-founders uh Mark who's based in the UK and hakeey who's based in Finland they had a previous business together in in semiconductors and in near field communications so they kind of defined the chip design for near field communications as in and Apple pay or you know absolute stuff yes and they sold that business to broadcom and then thought what's the next challenge energy and let's look at the engineering so that's kind of the the seed of the company and that's how we kind of came up with this uh mindset um you mentioned fundraising so yeah we did a fundraiser in the middle of the covert lockdown which was interesting you're going to investors and saying please trust me I would like some money but you've never met me you've only seen me on Microsoft teams so it was tricky and it took a little bit longer than we anticipated but we got a really good set of investors out the back of it so we're now backed by Bill Gates breakthrough energy fund and an amazing process that they put us through uh you know they sort of said uh here is an x uh head of r d for a general electric used to have 1 200 scientists reporting into him uh proof to him that your technology works then I'll talk about your business case so you have kind of a real kind of hurdle with them it was a really interesting process that they ran by the way we met Bill Gates not met bill yet or Melinda I don't know whether to do it together or I'd actually I don't know anything I think breakthrough energy is definitely a build thing I think the foundation okay I've not gone into their personal matters do you get a Christmas card you should send a Christmas card you might get one back there that's a good idea yeah we'll do that uh the other investors that joined were bgs they LED around they're a financial investor they raised money from High Street Banks British great very strong on governance exactly and uh Eaton as well who are kind of a strategic investor you know they they electric Bots electric bods they they make every kind of electrical Hardware that you can think of but they're also having a really big push into software and data um just as we said earlier you know everybody has a sass or a death platform now and they're making a really big push into that and making some kind of key strategic Investments as part of that push for that cool and then um is your business Capital intensive is it you know I know there's a lot of r d you guys have to do but do you have to buy a lot of stuff we talked about um containerized bits earlier like a Ultra capacitor or measurement devices do you have to build this stuff from scratch or can you buy it off the sh off the shelf you know of a container you know anyway yeah um and yeah does it cost a ton of money um no so the the device that's sending a signal into the grid effectively we get our customers to buy this grids are incentivized to own a large piece of capital and get a return from it that is the entire model of of regulated Monopoly so effectively that we build for them and sell to them so that sits on their balance sheet not ours okay the measurement units those do sit on our balance sheet but they're relatively lightweight usually with a grid kind of measurement box it would be a pretty big Hefty thing you would put it in a substation you have to shut the substation down while you install it again with the kind of engineering mindset we have we measure frequency from a wall socket so we plug into a domestic level wall socket and we measure frequency from that so it's a Plug and Play device It's relatively lightweight in terms of there must be so much noise that you guys have to cancel out it's such a noisy noisy signal it's an incredibly easy signal it's uh frequency is always described as a random walk and there's a whole load of noise on top of that and on top of that you know we're looking for a needle in a haystack if you're looking for a five megawatt signal on a 50 gigawatt Grid it's a very very small signal to look for because um uh to pull it in context you can get those you can get ethernet over your home home power Network right and you plug a thing into the wall there plug everything support thing into the wall there and whatever they tell you you're going to get you don't get anything like it that's very clever but it's very short distance um and um and there's no Transformers in the way that you have to try and hop this thing no Transformers in a way and even that you wouldn't really want to you wouldn't really want to rely on it and you guys are doing it with a tiny signal over massive distances on a grid with 50 gigawatts on it yeah and you've got generators banging in and out and smelter's banging in and out but there's a lot of both maybe Art and Science to shaping that signal making sure that it can propagate through the good making sure that you can extract it from there noise and then there's a whole load of techniques including repeating the signal many many times you know the most basic but then there's lots of other techniques to extract that signal from the noise and then lots of other techniques on top of that to kind of get the meaning out of it because once you've got the frequency sticker you still need to understand what does that mean in terms of inertia what is that signal telling me about in there because how it's kind of layers of Ip like you can design it it's like a fingerprint either end right and you can design a fingerprint for a signal with a little box it's very difficult to do that with a massive capacitor an ultra capacitor and yeah yeah so um although modern day inverters you know we sort of went on this journey we thought can anyone really create this signal and actually an engineer in 10 minutes sitting with inverter went you mean this signal oh yeah very clever yeah the modern kit is very very good and very accurate pretty much drawing any shape you want which has been fantastic for us yeah I remember I'm going back to my university days but yeah fast forward air transforms in digital signal processing you can you can basically play it's it's how you can you can with 100 quid box create the sound of a Stradivarius or whatever that is yeah it's the same it's the same thing yes um yeah digital uh kill the Radio Star as they say all right cool um and then where's the company going so you've got these two products plus the the new one that you're launching soon I'm very excited to see that actually that might be very interesting to us and our customers so we should talk about that uh and then um you know what's the vision where do we go in 10 years 20 years with reactive Technologies yeah absolutely so the the job is scaling and scaling means a couple of different things one you know we've proven that we can deliver this in the UK we can do it at scale we can prove that it works we get the data to National Grid but on the path to a profitable boost profitable business you need to do that more than once yes so part of that is that that International journey and part of my role as the Chief Operating Officer is you know how do we go on that scaling Journey how do we actually deliver this five times ten times 50 times you know ultimately we think will be a big demand for this product and it's a relatively kind of a blue ocean space it's a relatively clear space for us to compete in uh similar with the dno offering this uh energy Trader offering this relatively new one this is kind of the first then Branch into what else can we use this data for and we have this product going live uh towards the end of September beyond that we then think there's uses of the platform for a renewable generator that's trying to connect to the grid to understand the power quality to understand the harmonics and not only at the point of connection but maybe also during the course of the the life of the thing it was actually a a famous example in Australia there's a large battery that during the course of a firmware upgrade they accidentally deleted the droop curve so it stopped doing frequency response and its whole purpose and meaning of life was doing frequency someone got fired whoops the regulator took them to court you know they didn't just get a performance penalty they took them to court so actually monitoring the performance of the asset and the customer could be the grid that wants to monitor the performance of these assets or it could be the asset owner that wants to have a you know double check that you know something hasn't gone wrong it's very hard to sort of you know move and change a big spinning asset but it's very easy to change the firmware of an inverter for example so we think there's a whole load of other applications that we can build on this platform so we're going to scale what we have in multiple different geographies and prove that we can kind of deliver this but then we're also going to look at adjacent markets all related you know in energy and electricity but we think there's lots of different places and there's lots of different uh parties who would have an interest in Grid stability and an incentive to either do something about it or better understand the good stability to inform their operation and I guess the more grids you put it on the more so the slightly more the more training data you have if you like yeah and to learn what's normal and what isn't and it puts us in a fairly unique position if you look at the ge's and the Siemens and the schneiders of this world they build a box and they sell the box and it goes out the door and the grid has the data whereas we're rolling out the infrastructure ourselves because it's lightweight you can plug it in a wall we roll out the infrastructure we own that infrastructure and we have that data so we can train the models on it it's not somebody else training models on the data we have the data ownership and we're able to build that platform and build that asset data's eating world turns out yeah I want to ask you a very very difficult question to answer but I'm going to ask it anyway sure if you had to put your finger on you know the core bit of Ip here because we've talked today about a whole ecosystem of an end-to-end solution right which when you know when when put together is very complicated but it is innovation together but you've got 200 patents patents also so what so is it is it measurement is it signal creation is it you know time stamping is it Hardware what's a core bit that you're at all costs will protect [Laughter] so you know IP is very very interesting and a lot in a lot of Industries you see a huge amount of kind of this incremental Innovation if you look at semiconductors if you look at you know phones people are patenting these these tiny little parts of the system there's a couple of patterns we have which are incredibly broad we have one uh broad uh patent with then a whole load of associated families but the the broad patent is around the inertia measurement technique it's the concept of sending a signal to a grid and measuring an airshow that concept of being able to inject the power and take that measurement that's that's patented as a as a technique that's the real powerful one that's kind of at the core and then we have a number of other families that hang off that you know as you said around how do you form the signal how do you actually take these measurements cool very cool well um we've pretty much run out of time I just want to say thank you but it's only you want to plug right this is yours is your moment I feel like I've done my plug end of September I think we've got a product coming up trade energy that will be very very relevant for your audience awesome to yeah keep your eyes peeled or ears peeled or it'll be on websites and social media awesome get in touch with reactive and now my time to plug because I've been told by a producer we've got to start plugging stuff so if you're listening to this um you may have seen that we launched the bestjobs.com um which is a jobs board for people getting into batteries we need about 100 times more people into this sector to do Renewables and get to Net Zero so if you're looking at joining the sector and you're listening please do head to the bestjobs.com um we while we run the site we actually don't really we don't it's not to make money it's just uh to get to go from zero to one and do remember to hit subscribe and that's it so thanks very much for coming on thank you oh

2023-03-21 12:35

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