Host: James McWalter
Guest: Jason Huang | Founder | TS Conductor
Category: ⚡ Energy | Energy Delivery
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[0:15] “TS Conductor, I would argue, is the best conductor that has been developed in history. It reflects the ultimate combination of best materials that [are] available today to build a conductor. […] We use the most conductive aluminum type and we also feature carbon fiber composite that has all the attributes the industry has been looking for: extremely high strengths, lowest weight possible, and it does not have a summer expansion problem, which creates sag. […] On top of that, we have a […] breakthrough design. We leverage aluminum to protect the carbon composite. […] That protection from the aluminum, that is unique to us, provides a guarantee for safety, reliability, longevity that has been missing in the industry for the past century.”
[1:43] “When you think about electricity, it’s electrons. […] Nowadays, it's all about renewable generation. And these are normally in remote places. Our consumption side, which is called load centers, these are the cities. You have to move the electron. […] And the conductor is the pipeline for electrons. […] That's why a conductor is important and it's a critical piece of the power grid.”
[5:33] “Today, based on DOE numbers, there is about 8.3% of the electricity that is lost [globally] due to resistance heating. We call that line loss. […] It is about 2,000 terawatt hours of electricity wasted every year. To make up for that loss, you do compositor regeneration. It basically means you generate far more than you need just to make up for that compensatory generation. Using today's power generation mix [of] 30%, renewable and 70% traditional, we are creating about 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gasses every year. And if you can improve efficiency by half, you're basically cutting out 500 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses every year.”
[7:41] “The renewables we have today, a lot of these projects, whether it's solar or wind, 90% of them in our country are not able to be integrated to the power grid, because we have bottlenecks in the power grid. The average wait is about 3.5 years. And in some other countries, it's actually even longer. So if you are able to de-bottleneck the power grid, for example with our technology, using […] existing structures, like the powers and the poles, we can bring the capacity to 200% to […] even 300% of the baseline capacity. And that's going to transform how renewables can be integrated.”
[9:32] “The industry is slow for a reason. They expect reliability at any cost. We actually put safety and reliability as one of the six core principles at TS. And in our manufacturing process, we've developed x-ray machines that allow you to ensure the integrity of the composite material inside the conductor. […] We also deploy smart manufacturing in our system, you have a lot of video monitoring. […] We purposefully designed the product to be compatible with the standard way of working for the past century. By the way, the conductor that is dominating in today's power grid was invented in 1908.”
[15:25] “There is no mechanism today to motivate power grids to improve only efficiency, for example. The utilities are encouraged to make investments, and then they're allowed a coupon rate to basically collect the return on their investment. There is no mechanism to motivate them to let's say use a more advanced conductor, more efficient, to cut the loss, which will ultimately benefit the ratepayers, benefit the environment as well, because you are generating less waste. And yet, there is no mechanism for them to retain some of that benefit.”
[19:31] “We spend far more time and effort to improve on the efficiency in our refrigerators, microwaves, dishwashers, and you get incentivized for it. But yet the power grid system itself, we don't pay attention to the efficiency aspect. I would also ask that the utilities themselves in the past have always been conservative, risk averse. […] They don't necessarily get rewarded for being innovative and stepping outside the box. […] We need to use 21st century solutions for our problems, instead of relying on early 20th century technology to solve our pressing problems today.”
[21:29] “You don't need breakthrough innovations to make a difference. We can make a huge difference today by having an environment that allows utilities to be a little bit more bold and also to think outside the box.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 43 min | 🗓️ 05/03/2022
✅ Time saved: 41 min
