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The HUBER MILLS Digital Power Report
October 10, 2000
Gates in the Grid
Soft Switching Technologies and Intermagnetics General
Two other, closely related technologies to watch are the superconducting transformer and the solid-state soft switch.A superconducting transformer? AMSC and ABB have collaborated for a number of years building a prototype.
So have Siemens and Hydro-Quebec, Toshiba (TOSBF) and TEPCO, Waukesha Electric and Intermagnetics (IMG). They work. They’re more efficient (which can lead to serious savings in 100 MW boxes) and they’re a lot smaller - the two-story house shrinks down to a mere UHaul trailer. But at high-power AC, even superconductors develop inductive resistance (small magnetic vortices that dissipate power). The problem can be solved, and has been, with clever geometries and changes in materials.But no very attractive configuration has yet emerged.
If one does, Intermagnetics General Corporation (IMG) could well have a hand in it. Founded in 1971 as GE spin-off, IMG went public in 1981. It now ranks as a venerable pioneer in commercial low-temperature superconductors for magnetic imaging in medical applications.
Last February IMG launched a new subsidiary, SuperPower, to take charge of IMG’s high-temperature superconductor technology. (AMSC is entirely anchored by high-temperature superconductors.) Intermagnetics has already collaborated with (privately held) Southwire and the Department of Energy to build a prototype 100- foot superconducting power connection at a Southwire plant. The company’s most intriguing project is a superconducting fault current limiter - a very fast, smart, powerful, circuit breaker for big substations, which IMG is developing in partnership with Waukesha Electric, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin (LMT), Southern California Edison and Los Alamos Labs. The 17 kV pro- totype can absorb enormous quantities of current - the "fault" - almost instantly. It’s more efficient, robust, reliable - and smaller - than the units it might replace.
Then there’s Soft Switching Technologies [(SST) still private]. For the most common, relatively modest power sags that plague the grid, super-fast powerchips alone can often take care of things, without any additional energy storage device at all. The most important practical application here is one step below the substation, on the internal, local-area power grid of a power-hungry corporate campus.
A single General Motors (GM) factory, for example, requires nearly two-dozen 2 MW transformers on its premises to handle its power. Ford (F), Novell (NOVL), Lucent (LU), and International Rectifier (IRF), have comparable scale private grids on their property. All are already customers of Soft Switching Technologies (Middleton, WI).
Some 90 percent of the "faults" in grid power are created by "first reclosure events." Think of it as rebooting the substation. A sudden current surge downstream suggests the possible need to shut off power flows through the substation completely. But is such drastic action really needed? Perhaps the suicidal squirrel won’t linger. The substation’s hardware doesn’t know, so it opens and immediately re-closes a huge switch, once, and then again, and then (if it must) a third time, each time hoping that the problem will somehow have gone away in the meantime. Which indeed it will have, if the current-surging squirrel has been vaporized. A single reclosure event typically lasts about 12 cycles, or 1/5th of a second. Which merely blinks the lights, but crashes everything digital in the line of fire.
The standard defense today: pile on capacitors and inductors down closer to the load. Or, if the power levels warrant it, an AMSC D-SMES and powerchips. But when the interruptions are short enough, and the loads small enough, smart switching alone can solve the problem. The trick is to build a box that’s smart and fast enough to draw more current at the intake when voltage drops, and instantaneously recreate the proper output voltage and current at the outlet.
Soft Switching builds it. Their president, Deepak Divan, left academe in 1995 to found a company based entirely on this simple but hugely powerful idea. The company’s leading product today is its Dynamic Sage Corrector (DySC).
It’s built around powerchips supplied by Semicron, Toshiba, and Eupec; it can handle from 1.5 to 2,000 kW, and in size, it runs from about shoe box to commercial refrigerator (tiny in the world of big power). On the strength of superfast, supersmart switching alone, the DySC can smooth out the most common voltage sags - sags of up to 50 percent voltage deficit, lasting up to 15 cycles (1/4 second). Add a modest bank of capacitors, and the DySC can ride out 3 cycles of 100 percent voltage sags.
Functionally, the DySC power electronics replace or at least greatly extend the lives of less exotic ride-through technologies like batteries and flywheels. At the margin, it can compete directly against them.
In addition to its direct sales to companies like General Motors, Ford, Lucent and International Rectifier, SST manufactures the DySC as an OEM product sold through Square D, a large supplier of conventional high-power switches. SST also has an operating relationship with Asian Electronics Limited (India), where SST is establishing a wholly-owned subsidiary to manufacture products for shipment to U.S. markets. SST is also in discussions with Invensys (INVSY), a major UPS supplier. The DySC is already priced below the old analog solutions (which center on huge, slothlike, analog inductors). And the oldguard technologies have already bottomed-out on their cost curves. The costs of SST’s powerchips, by contrast, have only just begun to fall - and they’re going to fall as far as silicon generally falls, which is pretty close to forever.
ABB
What do sub-sea oil production platforms, pharmaceutical companies, food processors, pulp & paper mills, chemicals, airports, and dot-coms all have in common? A 10 MW substation, engineered by ABB. When the CBOT went down in Chicago, Commonwealth Edison called on the best in the business, ABB again, to reengineer and rebuild - and on a panic, seven-month deadline. ABB delivered. It built one new 200 MVA 138/12.47 kV substation from scratch, and refurbished four others, largely by modifying switchgear/breaker configurations.
The $25 billion-a-year ABB is both the world’s leading manufacturer of many substation components and the leading integrator of complete substation solutions. ABB also owns the power industry’s only counterpart to Bell Labs - a $2 billion/year (8 percent of ABB’s revenues!) research operation headquartered in Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland, with additional facilities in seven other countries, including the United States. ABB now ranks as the world’s leading developer of grid hardware, and the owner of the most sophisticated software assets required to add logic intelligently to high-power grids. Headed up by Randy Schrieber, VP in Raleigh, NC, the company’s U.S. Power Distribution group handles city-level grid operations. Over the next decade, this group will emerge as the leading provider of logic gates to the U.S. grid.
ABB’s component technology begins with the most basic - the high-power powerchip. ABB’s proprietary 1 MW monster IGCT single-wafer powerchips are aimed squarely at the power levels typically encountered in the distribution layers of the grid. And with the opening of a new fab plant in Lenzburg, Switzerland last spring, ABB has significantly expanded its powerchip manufacturing capabilities. ABB also has retained a stake in lower power powerchips through its large institutional holding in IXYS (SYXI) (April DPR).
One step above powerchips, ABB manufactures powerchip modules. The company is a major player in the Navy Power Electronics Building Block, PEBB, program (April DPR); ABB expects to release a commercial PEBB within the next year or so. The unit will be capable of serving as a building-level super-UPS at the front end of Powercosm hotels. ABB already has pilot customers in a Mid-West plastics manufacturer, and in a university that found itself being "UPSed to death," in Schrieber’s words.
ABB also manufactures a wide range of more conventional substation components. It is the largest transformer manufacturer in the world ($2 billion in sales). It manufactures sealed, gas-insulated switchgear that has a dramatically smaller footprint (it cuts a high-voltage 10- foot connection down to 10 inches) and is a lot more reliable than the conventional air-insulated alternatives. ABB also makes surge arresters, generator circuit breakers, advanced converters, and control technologies.
Finally, ABB is the world’s leading provider of turnkey substation analysis and rebuilding. ABB now offers customers Dell-like capabilities to build-your-own personal substation on an ABB website. This takes some doing.
The dynamics of massive current flows through long wires and nodal equipment are very complex indeed - as complex as the dynamics of a jumbo jet - which, as it happens, processes about as much thrust power under its wings as a typical substation conveys through its transformers and wires. About half the cost of building a traditional substation lies in the components themselves; the other half in the engineering and construction. ABB does both.
Extremely sophisticated modeling allows ABB to optimize the delivery of 9s to any customer at any node. The software dynamically analyzes the surrounding grid, its wires, switches, and transformers, assigning to each a probability of failure, duration of outage, and a time-torepair horizon. And on that basis, it searches out optimal equipment configurations within the constraints imposed by the surrounding grid, the customer’s needs, the utility’s budget, and a host of other factors. Footprint is one of them. As it did in Chicago, ABB can configure systems small enough to go inside commercial buildings. Much of the footprint reduction in Chicago came from applying logic, software and controls to existing components.
Until quite recently, ABB was vertically integrated from big turbines down to low-power switches. But it has recently shed about one-third of its operations (accounting for $10 billion-a-year in annual revenues).
Today half of its six business segments, and some 60 percent of its revenues, are anchored in core technologies of the Powercosm. Another 25 precent come from electric technologies for commercial buildings (circuit breakers, control panels, fuse gear, switches and so on) that will increasingly come to be centered in powerchips and the Powercosm. The remainder of ABB’s business lies in the enabling technologies for the oil and gas industries, a tiny share in renewable energy (politically very important in Europe), and a modest (by GE standards) $1 billion financial services account. Among the businesses recently shed are: refrigeration, rod and wire operations, rail operations, and heavy turbines.
ABB did, however, recently launch a microturbine - the TURBEC single shaft, oil bearing, 100 kW unit, a joint venture with Volvo Aerospace.
ABB’s traditional focus has been outside the United States. But ABB is a global company, and it clearly recognizes the ascendancy of the U.S. Powercosm market. Its Raleigh-based operations, and pending NYSE listing testify to that. We suspect it has a significant U.S. acquisition or joint-venture in the works. In the enormously complex and expensive challenge of adding intelligence to the power grid, ABB now ranks as the clear technology leader worldwide.
This is the company that brings together and knows how to integrate powerchips, power switches, smartchips and software. Judge it, too, by its technology alumni: Ake Almgrem of Capstone (July DPR) and Jerry Lietman of FuelCell Energy (September DPR). Look to ABB to announce several breakthrough power products at the time of its NYSE listing a month or two from now.
Gates in the Grid
The grid will get more gates. It will get smarter. Utilities know what must be done, and have the resources to do it; given some reasonable certainty of cost recovery, they are perfectly willing to invest them. The best among them are eager to - eager to push 9s down the grid, toward the multiplying number of griddependent digital users, who need more 9s, but can’t realistically embark on supplying them to themselves.
Regulators won’t stand in the way: to the contrary, they are already clamoring for the upgrades. Environmental activists won’t block things either. Some will merely stand aside; other will even applaud increasing the intelligence of the grid at substation nodes, because electrical efficiency of the grid can be improved, with much of the work occurring on brownfield urban sites.
At the most fundamental level, AMSC and ABB are in the business of caching power and switching it intelligently. And they know how to cache and switch it better than anyone else. Intel works with nanometers and microwatts. AMSC and ABB, with kilometers and megawatts. Ceramics for bits and ceramics for electrons. Gates on a chip and gates on the grid. Same business, really. Just twelve orders of magnitude apart on the power curve.
Peter Huber & Mark Mills October 10, 2000
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