The world's power infrastructure is filled with transformers, devices that change the voltage as electricity flows through the power grid. They are found almost everywhere, from power plants to cell phone chargers. Most have remained unchanged since they were first developed in the late 1800s.
This longevity is not only a testament to the original design, but also to how little the grid has changed in the intervening years.
But with distributed renewable energy, batteries, and electric vehicles, change is coming to the world's power grid faster than at any time in the last century. Electricity no longer needs to flow primarily in one direction, from a few large power plants to millions of end users. Instead, each of these end-users has the potential to become a power supplier, which makes life difficult for the humble transformer.
Additionally, demand for transformers exceeds supply, delaying the deployment of renewable power projects and increasing costs.
The advent of solid-state transformers is expected to become what integrated circuits are to vacuum tubes. Traditional transformers are passive devices that step up or down the voltage of a power supply without thinking. You can expect even more features in the solid-state version.
For years, they were nothing more than research projects. Amperesand wants to change that. He raised $12.45 million in a seed round to help the power electronics startup commercialize silicon carbide solid-state transformer technology developed in his lab at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. The round was co-led by Temasek's early-stage arm Xora Innovation and Material Impact. TDK Ventures and Foothill Ventures participated.
sparks fly
Modern transformers are proven, highly efficient, and relatively inexpensive. But they're also huge and don't help you adjust voltage or frequency. If the surge or dip is too large, the grid can become unstable.
As more things are added to the grid, from solar arrays to whole-house batteries and EV fast chargers, problems become even more likely. A wind turbine's converter produces a frequency that increases or decreases depending on wind speed, but may output a steady amount of power that is slightly different than other models. The same applies to battery controllers and solar power inverters. “There's no uniformity, it's pretty random,” Anshuman Tripathi, co-founder and vice president of engineering, told TechCrunch. “If this happens, you need an active front end.” This active front end not only consumes power as given, but also helps smooth out the randomness.
A solid state transformer can fill that role. But it will take several years for risk-averse utilities to decide to use EVs, so Ampesando is starting by letting EV charging companies power its ports.
A view of Ampere Sand's facility. Image credits: ampersand
“EV charging is a great use case,” said Phil Inagaki, managing director of Xora and interim CEO of Ampelesand. “The scale at which people are looking to deploy EV charging around the world creates the biggest market for transformers.”
In addition, solid-state transformers are smaller and have lower cooling requirements than traditional ones, which can reduce the space required for installation by up to 75%, Inagaki said. “If you want to install fast charging stations in urban areas, there may not be a lot of space,” he says. Even outside of the city, space is a consideration. “I was surprised that people in the fast charging space were talking about fast charging more than I expected.”
Ampesand said the transformer can be expanded to meet the needs of different locations. Unlike traditional transformers, which are monolithic devices, solid-state transformers can be built using modules. Need more power? Just add more modules.
Changing the way transformers are manufactured
For a company looking to sell expensive grid-integrated equipment, $12.5 million isn't far off. Thankfully, the startup doesn't anticipate having to build much manufacturing infrastructure other than final assembly near where the transformers will be used. Many semiconductor manufacturers can produce silicon carbide devices, and even more suppliers can provide printed circuit boards. Amperesando plans to deliver the first units to the US and Singapore in 2025, with full commercialization the following year.
“Old transformers are based on iron cores and cooling oil. These are very difficult to scale up in manufacturing,” Inagaki said. “Nothing advances performance and cost more than semiconductor technology.”
Additionally, because solid-state transformers are primarily semiconductors, they are equipped with sensors that can provide grid operators with detailed data that provides deeper insight into how the grid is operating.
Inagaki believes that once the company proves its technology and gains customer interest, Amperesand can quickly grow its revenue. “This is not like a low asking price unit,” Inagaki said. “We think this is a ready-to-go type of company. [reach] First $100 million in revenue. There is plenty of headroom to achieve a $1 billion revenue run rate without impacting the overall market in terms of infrastructure deployed. ”
If the company can crack the market, it could put the power grid on the path to becoming the “internet of electricity” that experts have been eyeing for years. Such a grid would not only rely on coarse signals from a small number of points, but would also have a large amount of data. demand, such as plugging in an electrical semiconductor to charge, responding to a surge in power from a solar neighbor, or summoning distributed batteries to stabilize the power grid when clouds pass through a neighborhood. can quickly respond to sudden increases in
The Internet of Electricity will be years away, but solid-state transformers could be the basis for it all.