Utility Week

8 www.utilityweek.co.uk/fLeX U P F R O N T Faraday Grid promises paradigm shift in energy distribution T he changing way we generate energy will create problems for our ageing infrastructure. As the system becomes increasingly decentralised and populated by renewable generators, today's grid will need to adapt to facilitate a more dynamic, multidirectional flow of electricity, to avoid becoming fragile and unbalanced. How to modify the way we use and generate energy going forward is a difficult question. e Faraday Grid's founder and chief technology officer, Matthew Williams, believes his company has developed the best, and most sustainable, answer. "I saw the way that engineering was going to try and resolve the problem was to come up with these new technologies, apply IoT, or blockchain, or whatever, to the energy sector, and use it as expensive add-ons that makes the system more complex, more fragile, more costly, just to address the symptoms. But I felt, as more of a systems designer, that fundamentally the system wasn't really fit for purpose any more," says Williams, an Australian systems architect and mechatronic engineer. Williams and his colleagues at the Edinburgh-based company claim to have developed a transformer replacement that can balance power flow better than devices such as transformers, converters, rectifiers and inverters. e Faraday Grid's founders say its technology allows 80 per cent plus integration of non-synchronous renewable energy generation, 25 per cent greater grid carrying capacity and 7 per cent less network losses. To achieve this, it needs only to remove transformers according to the existing schedules of their replacement. Established in 2016, Faraday was spun out of Australian systems integration firm Exigen, where Williams served as managing director, with current Faraday Grid chief executive Andrew Scobie as chairman. e company has already caught the attention of WeWork chief executive Adam Neumann, who invested £25 million in January. Mark Corben, who spent five years as the chief financial officer of Tideway, has recently been appointed as CFO at Faraday. Some in the industry are sceptical of Faraday's ability to create such significant improvement. e wariness, Williams believes, has been justified: "I always take [scepticism] as a positive thing, because electricity is so important you don't want to be just letting anyone touch it." Precise details have been sketchy from e Faraday Grid, pending a patent application, and today's meeting is also light on technical amplification. Williams is keen to stress the bigger picture on the company's invention. "It was always about the system, our whole approach was not let's invent a new widget and try to sell that, it was 'what are we actually trying to solve' and how can we enable it? is kind of incremental, iterative approach that people are taking makes the system better but ultimately it's going to be limited on how good we can make it. "If we're going to have our reliable, affordable, decarbonised energy system, we need something that's going to be resilient and flexible." What is the technology? e company aims to usher in the next evolution of the energy grid on the back of its three-layered technology; the Faraday Exchanger, the Faraday Grid, and Emergent. e Exchanger is the hardware, an autonomous device able to "control the voltage, the RMS voltage, completely remove all the harmonics, control power factor, and balance across the phases". Made up of an electromagnetic core, the Exchanger also has a power electronics control system. e Exchanger's core differs from a traditional transformer's in the metals used, as well as the geometry and arrangement of the core and windings. e power electronics are what provide certain balancing features, with Williams saying that should they fail, the Exchanger will revert to a passive mode, still able to control voltage, power factor, harmonics, and phase balance until the electronics are replaced. Williams says the Exchanger is more flexible and affordable than devices such as inverters or solid-state transformers With claims of boosting the capacity of the grid by 25 per cent, Faraday Grid's ambitions are certainly audacious. Are the days of the conventional transformer numbered? By Greg Jones Williams: "electricity is so important you don't want to be just letting anyone touch it"

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