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A couple of months ago, I was in Brussels speaking at the launch of the second edition of Supergrid Super Solution: A Handbook for Energy Independence and a Europe Free From Fossil Fuels. I’d participated in tuning the second edition, written by European renewables giant Eddie O’Connor with Kevin O’Sullivan, editor of The Irish Times. While there, I had the opportunity to sit down with John Fitzgerald, CEO superconducting startup Supernode. This is the podcast and the transcript of the second half of our conversation, lightly edited. If you haven’t listened/read the first half of the conversation, here’s the link.
Michael Barnard (MB): Welcome back to Redefining Energy Tech, sponsored by TFIE Strategy. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today, returning for the second half of our conversation, is John Fitzgerald, CEO of superconducting transmission startup Supernode. Because the spark gap is I think a much greater point of discussion in Europe and the coupling is a much greater concern in Europe than it is in North America — I don’t think North Americans are even that sophisticated yet — so tell me about the spark gap and the implications of that.
John Fitzgerald (JF): I was in the TSO community and I would have been part of the ENSOE, which was the association of TSO CSOs in Europe of which there are 25, 27, 30, there’s a lot and they would be an equivalent for gas and they would plan their network and they would plan their investments and they have attempted to make sure that they’re not putting the same infrastructure and obviating value by connecting the same customer with gas and electricity. Put it simply — so it is an effort to coordinate the activities in the markets of the gas networks in terms of investments, but also the gas market.
So, gas drives electricity prices in Europe and has done right through since competition came because the easiest way to develop an independent power project was with a combined cycle gas turbine because it was pretty modular and you could develop one in three, four years and make your money if you got the gas at a price. You had your efficiency, your major electricity, get your long-term contract or play in the spot market. So, Europe has had a lot of gas-driven electricity signals and competition working for a long time. So, I would say for 20, 30 years they’ve been perfecting it. And sometimes you can be more sophisticated. So you use the term Europe being more sophisticated. But that sophistication can distract you from the big game which is decarbonizing, which needs a different set of tools and a different set of priorities.
And I think China set itself a 2060 target and I think there’s probably a lot more credibility in the Chinese target than in some of the targets we have close to the home.
MB: Well, I’ll just say that I get some disagreement and pushback from this from other China watchers in the energy space. They under-promise and they over-deliver.
JF: It’s impressive what they’ve done and I think there must be a lot of — there’s certainly — public acceptance for infrastructure is still pretty high there. But also their preparedness to incorporate innovative technology onto their power system — which is big, it’s a big grid — but their preparedness to incorporate it surpasses anybody else. So they’re happy to go from technology readiness level six straight, you know, straight into operation. And they seem to have the COVID and the understanding to the extent they need it appears from the outside.
MB: Cornelis [Plet of DNV] shares that. He and I were talking about some of the Chinese interconnected connectors and he was saying they have the appetite for 2 gigawatts going away if there’s a challenge and we don’t. Now part of that is like everything else, China didn’t have any transmission in 1980. That’s basically what it was. If we consider what China has built since 1980, it’s vastly more transmission, especially direct current transmission than in the rest of the world. It’s 177,000 kilometers of roads, 500 cities, 46,000 as of this year, kilometers of high speed electrified rail ports that are bigger and more sophisticated and more complex than anything in the west because, well, that’s where all the stuff is flowing out of to get to our cities and stuff.
JF: It’s impressive. It certainly is. It’s impressive what they’ve managed to achieve. And as an engineer, you can’t but marvel at their appetite for innovation, particularly in the power sector, because it’s certainly less, there’s less of an appetite in Europe.
MB: What it means though is that the average Chinese person would be living in a very different society than their children or parents, would be living with very different opportunities, radically different. They have huge gulfs between the generations, their experiences and they’ve lived with tumultuous change. There are people alive today who are cashiered as intellectuals and sent to be serfs in the countryside to deforest China because of some of the stupider policies. So that’s kind of a weird cultural thing we don’t have. So for them, I would say because it’s changing because there’s so much internal dislocation, there’s some attachment to place and there’s certainly places they protect for natural beauty.
The average people our age didn’t have electricity. They haven’t grown a class of people who are entitled to the way the countryside looks artificially and has for 40 years. To be clear, in The British Isles, there is no natural countryside. It’s all being shaped by human hands. And what we love about the countryside is stuff that was in some cases set down 400 years ago by people. But it’s not natural, it’s just what we like aesthetically.
JF: I’m not a big student of China. I just admire what they’ve done in this particular aspect and I’m sure there are other bits that I would leave rather than take, but on that particular aspect, I admire them, you know, for what they’ve achieved. And there’s different reasons and different values and cultures and so on. Some of the most ardent opponents of public infrastructure, overhead infrastructure, typically people who didn’t live in the countryside, who retired from a job in London and decided they wanted to live back where they came from and retired and had a sense of what that was going to be like. And then the local power company came and tried to put up these steel masts in their environment and they went pretty ballistic.
And they would probably be not the only opponents, but some of the most vehement opponents wouldn’t be of the community as such, they would be transplanted with. But having said that, I can understand why people don’t want infrastructure imposing in their space. I can understand it.
MB: I have a bit of a nuanced position because I’ve looked at this globally, especially around wind energy. I spent a lot of time dealing with some of the disinformation around wind energy. A decade ago, I was engaged in Australia, I was engaged in Ontario, and I was looking at these things and my observation was, the people who actually live and work in the countryside are looking for any economic development. A working farm will say, you’re going to put a pylon in my working farm? Great, let’s negotiate the lease for the land.
JF: That’s right. I’ve seen farmers who are very upset because they have autistic children and they feel that the emissions associated with AC overhead will upset them. You know, and, you know, I’ve had letters from very wealthy people, you know, solicitors and barristers, letters because, you know, their horses will be upset. They’re thoroughbred horses. So there are legitimate concerns that drive people as well.
MB: Let me rephrase that. They have concerns, but neither of the ones you described are legitimate. They’re phobias and fears that have nothing to do with reality. They’re health scares. I’m going to be really blunt about this. What I see is to your point, the Londoners who pick up a rural estate for their retirement or their vacation property, they’re very experienced at communications campaigns and they’re very experienced at fear campaigns, fear of change campaigns. I’ve traced this globally and you can track. Oh, those people are the ones creating the problem. There’s a rich doctor who set up 5 of the health institutions in Ontario who set up who had his retirement property in Prince Edward County. He’s formed two different anti wind groups and he was actively promoting medical disinformation unethically. Same thing in Australia.
But let’s get back to transmission because there’s lots of stuff we could talk about there. You’ve got scars from this stuff.
JF: Yeah, I, and people who worked with me and around me, you know, have had instances where our personal safety was borderline compromised in some meetings that got very heated, but it’s understandable. It’s part of the conversation. Let’s get back to transmission.
MB: So transmission. So we’ve talked NATO-L, we’ve talked some of the big long ones, we’ve talked some of the short ones. I think it’s time to pivot to superconducting transmission versus direct current. So let’s start with just the really obvious thing. What does superconducting mean? And what is high temperature superconducting?
JF: It was a European physicist, or he might have been a chemist, but he’s certainly a scientist. Back in the early 1900s discovered that mercury, if you cool it down to 4 degrees Kelvin, which is pretty cold, it would superconduct, the resistance disappeared and the current would just keep going for years on the stuff. It just never stopped. And that was pretty abstract because 4 degrees Kelvin isn’t a place that’s easy to get to or stay at. And then in the 1980s some physicists discovered high temperature superconductors. So when you say high temperature, there’s low temperature which is around 30 Kelvin in that kind of neighborhood. And high temperature is in the kind of 70 Kelvin neighborhood. So it’s still pretty cold. Minus 200 Celsius. Yeah.
MB: So for people who are listening in, the coldest day you’ve ever experienced, take 220 degrees off that.
JF: You’re from Canada, so maybe not quite.
MB: I’ve been at minus 40, so another 160.
JF: Superconductors exist, they’re technically mature. If you’ve ever had an MRI, you’ve relied on a superconductor because what they do is they generate exceptionally high currents. You can put very high currents on them, they won’t heat up. The physical properties of some substances, typically a REBCO [Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide], barium, copper oxide materials, yttrium, gadolinium, and they can be found in lots of places. And when you cool them down to minus 200, they can conduct it. Something to do with Cooper pairs. I don’t think it’s fully understood. I don’t claim to fully understand it. I know it works every time.
The electrons can pass very freely through the matrix, through the atoms, they can pass very freely and there’s no resistance. They generate no heat. If you have copper, which is a pretty good conductor and it served us very well, and aluminium too, aluminium is nearly as good, but when you pass current through them, there is a bit of resistivity. So you know the table here, that’s not much of a conductor. Copper is a pretty good conductor, but there will be resistance and the current squared times the resistance generates heat. And that heat, it costs money because you’ve lost energy because it goes up in heat. And if you have overhead transmission lines, they will have different ratings. So typically every utility, they have two or three ratings on overhead lines, the summer rating and a winter rating.
The reason why the winter rating is higher is because it’s colder, so the conductor won’t sag as much and touch off trees or vegetation and cause faults or flashovers or the like. With a superconductor that doesn’t happen at all, you get no heat. You can keep putting as much current as you want through it and it will not once you don’t exceed its critical current. Now I have a superconductor here.
MB: Oh, I get to touch a superconductor! Sweet!
JF: Well, actually, you don’t. It’s under the cellotape at the back of my business card because otherwise I lose it. That’s a 12 millimeter superconductor with copper coating on it and that’s capable of carrying about something like 750 or 800 amps. To put that in context, this cable that you have on machines are all devices here, typically they have 13 amps on them.
The biggest interconnectors in the world will have about 2,000 amps on them. Underground interconnectors, overhead infrastructure, might get to the biggest projects, might get to with multiple circuits, multiple conductors, might get to 4,000 or 5,000 amps. That’s 700 to 800amps right there.
MB: So this is like a sixth of multiple overhead direct current interconnectors. For the audience, it’s a piece of tape. That’s pretty much a piece of tape a centimeter wide. That’s it.
JF: Yes. And the thing about it is that only 1% of that tape, so that’s probably 200 times less volume than a comparable copper conductor and mass and weight, but only 1% of it is a superconducting material. A lot of that is just the substrate and the mechanical support and protection. The superconductor is only 1%. It’s freakishly efficient at carrying a lot of current. You can wrap these tapes and manipulate them and carry as much current. So typically five times more current. And that’s not limited by the superconductors. It’s limited by going back to copper or aluminium, as the case might be at either end and how you handle the current. So the superconductor doesn’t generate any heat.
The reason why the biggest interconnector cables in the world are limited to two or maybe two and a half thousand amps is because the copper melts the insulation if you go hotter. They have crosslink polyethylene insulation, which is pretty good. They used to use oil and oil filled cables and paper, and so now they use crosslink polyethylene and it’s pretty good. And it can run to 90 Celsius. If you put more current through the copper, the I squared R losses will literally generate so much heat you compromise and damage the insulation and the cable system.
MB: Is this AC & DC?
JF: AC & DC, it’s the same principle. This is resistive losses that exist, whether it’s AC or DC.
MB: Which is one of the reasons why HVDC is used for connecting offshore wind farms, because the ocean is just sitting there sucking up all the heat.
JF: Now superconductors can be AC or DC, so they’re not in the DC family, they’re not in the AC family. It is just a different conductor that can do AC or DC. You can do both. The big thing is, rather than the cable heating up, keeping it under 90 degrees Celsius, you’re doing the opposite. You want to keep the ambient temperature from outside the cable getting in.
It’s running at minus 200 Celsius. So if you think about the difference, one’s running at 90, the other’s running at minus 200. There’s nearly a 300 Celsius delta between the two. What you want to do is you have to expend energy to keep the cryogen cold. Now the cryogen can be a number of materials for high temperature superconductors. Nitrogen, liquid nitrogen is typically the favorite cryogen. You cool your liquid nitrogen to minus 200 Celsius and you run it in or around the superconductors and then you wrap some insulation around that and you pull a vacuum and you keep it as cool as you can for as long as you can. Ultimately the liquid nitrogen, some of the heat from the external environment passes through the cable and heats up the liquid nitrogen and you have to take out the liquid nitrogen and cool it down again and on and on. So you have like repeater stations and it depends on the geometry.
MB: Roughly what’s kind of a medium distance for the repeater stations?
JF: That’s an excellent question. That’s what Supernode has been working on. The superconducting tape is mature and there are some very good products there in the market. Some of the leading cable companies in the world will sell you a superconducting system today. They’re used for urban congestion, typically a kilometer and they’ve been used for the last 20 years. Really where there isn’t much of an alternative if you want to get a lot of power into an area with a lot of constraints, be they real estate, be they the lack of availability of a voltage as high voltage substations and you want to get a lot of power into typically an urban setting. That’s when a superconductor will be employed.
The largest project is currently under development and it’s being developed in Munich by the utility, Stadtwerke Münche, but they’re looking at a 12 to 15 kilometer superconductor because they want to turn off some must run generation that’s fossil fuel based. They want to retire it and they don’t want to build a new one. So this superconducting cable is going to operate at 110 kilovolts ac and it’s going to move about 500 megawatts, which wouldn’t be possible with ac. Conventional copper aluminum cables, they wouldn’t be capable of transferring that much electricity.
MB: You could do a DC one, but then you’d have to have the expense of the D.C. conversion station, the variable source commutation again, and half the cost of direct current is the VSC station, as I understand it?
JF: Yeah, yeah. And it can be. And that’s another conversation about why is it so expensive, you know, and I think there’s probably things that can be done there to improve the costings and optimize them. And it’s great technology. So that’s the largest project. So you ask how far? So 15 kilometers. And that’s using today’s technology, which is essentially a corrugated steel pipe. So if you work from the outside, it looks like.
MB: Wait a minute, wait a minute. We’ve been talking about yttrium and we’ve been talking about, you know, Kelvin scale stuff, and then we’re talking corrugated steel pipe?
JF: Forgive me, apologies. I’ve taken a few jumps there. So if basically the yttrium or the gadolinium is used by the superconducting tape companies, and there are a couple of companies doing that. There’s Metox and others in the US, there’s Teva here in Europe, there’s Shanghai Superconductor and there’s, you know, there’s others as well. There’s probably 10 or 15 companies who are improving the manufacturing processes and the capabilities of the superconducting cable. So it’s in great shape. Cost will probably come down. We see what happened with batteries and with solar, you know, happening there. As volume comes into it, the costs will crash. But then that’s just the tape. So you’ve got to put that in a cable system and have it robust.
MB: It’s not just a piece of cellotape through a big pipe, you’re going to put a layered system with a piece of tape at the middle of it.
JF: I’ll just describe what Supernode does, and it’s similar to what others do too, but we use slightly different pipe work, cryogenics. In all the projects that have been delivered to date, what they have in common is a corrugated steel inner cryostat [a device used to maintain extremely low temperatures for scientific, industrial, or medical purposes]. Now I say corrugated. It’s exactly that. It’s like a giant accordion expands and contracts. When you bring it down to minus 200, it’s going to contract. When you bring it back to room temperature for maintenance, like every cable needs maintenance every now and again to see, you know, how it’s doing, it’s going to expand. They need to be capable of switching in and out. You have to bring it back to room temperature. The whole thing expands and that helps maintain all the joints, the vacuums, the seals and everything.
Your superconductor tape, you can put it in the liquid nitrogen channel. You’ve got your liquid nitrogen in a pipe with a superconductor. Outside that pipe you’ve got some Mylar, some white tissue like material that’s used for high grade insulation. You’ve loads of layers of that. Then you have an outer corrugated steel pipe in between the two corrugated steel pipes. You pull a vacuum and that makes it very efficient and stops the heat from getting in.
MB: Right. So it’s basically a linear Dewar flask.
JF: Exactly. It’s a pipe and a pipe system. That’s where you can pump liquid nitrogen fairly long distances and without it heating up too much. And then you’ve got to be able to take the liquid nitrogen out and cool it down.
MB: What are those distances?
JF: That’s back to the median distance between the recooling space. It depends on the geometry. But typically less than 10 km today.
MB: That’s more than I thought. So that’s actually pretty good.
JF: It is unless you want to move power 100 km and then 10 won’t do. So unless you’re happy to have a station that will basically a repeater station that will replenish, repressurize, recool, liquid nitrogen.
MB: We need repeater stations on every form of long distance power transmission [correction: HVDC uniquely doesn’t need intermediate stations, but HVAC needs compensation stations]. For natural gas networks we have compressor stations every 100 to 140 kilometers. If we start stupidly pumping hydrogen through pipes, they’ll have to be more frequent and higher pressure for direct current things.
JF: Even for fiber optics over long distance there can be repeaters just to bring the signal back to where it was through attenuation or whatever.
MB: Just an economic element of the thing.
JF: I’ll come back to what Supernode does. We don’t use corrugated steel. That’s the innovation. Somebody told me it was combinatorial innovation, which is a fancy word for saying we take something from one area, we take something from another area, we put it together and we say that’s innovative. The oil and gas industry over the past 20 years had developed very high grade cryostats for the LNG and for high pressure oil and gas applications for hot and cold. And the first, the limitation of distance is because the corrugations caused the liquid nitrogen. They interfere with the flow, they introduce friction, it heats up and it depressurizes quicker.
So if you had a smooth bore, you could go three times further. If you can go three times further and you can keep it cool, that’s getting rid of two repeater stations.
MB: I’m just having a little flashback to Cornelis Plet’s conversation. We were talking about the skin effect on alternating current creating eddies around the surface.
JF: It’s very much like that. It is eddies in the flow which cause friction and turbulence and they limit the distance that you can go. If you have a smooth bore, you need something that will be able to cycle from room temperature down to minus 200 without expanding or contracting in ways you don’t want it to. You need to tune the coefficient of terminal expansion of your inner cryostat and those materials. Supernode has patented technology under development and under test and prototype testing TRL5 as we speak, that can do that job. Supernode’s value proposition is that there isn’t a superconducting project in the world that couldn’t be better with Supernode technology in it, be it AC or dc.
MB: Two or three things to pull apart there. One is, I have spent far too much time in the past couple of years looking at especially U.S. drilling technology. I’ve ended up looking at a lot of subsurface applications and stuff like that. Deep geothermal. I’ve been looking at proposed underground pressurized water storage and pressurized gas storage systems. So I know a bit more. But the question there is why do they have materials that are so good at those temperature ranges and fluctuations?
JF: Why did they do it? I guess they needed to operate at very high pressures and temperatures and they developed umbilicals for that purpose, reinforced thermoplastic pipes with carbon fiber wrap so they could tune it. And what we did is we took those and we adapted them a little bit differently to tune the coefficient of terminal expansion. And then we did a hell of an amount of testing on them and to try and find the right materials. We have three inner cryostat materials we’re progressing at the moment. One is manufactured, one is being manufactured and the other is not quite ready for its manufacturing. Readiness level is a bit behind, but it’s really promising. So we’ve got materials that are lighter, that cost a fraction of the cost, they’re more flexible, so we can reel them on a drum.
They look like a regular cable. So it’s really exciting to be able to put something in the market from another sector and see that it can deliver value. We’ll do some testing and this year we voltage tested us up to 90kV. We were pretty pleased with that. We were expecting around 70 plus, so 90kv. We’ve yet to optimize some of the outer cryostats for voltage purposes and so we’re pretty happy with how it’s performing. We have liquid nitrogen cooling rigs. Now we’re going to do the high current testing and next year we’ll take it to National Grid, have an innovation centre in the uk and we’re going to do a live demonstration and we’re going to run 5 kiloamps on our cable and to demonstrate that it can handle it without any issue.
And we’ll be doing the whole superconducting piece there, maybe a 30 or 50 meter section. And what’s exciting about that is we could do 10 kiloamps. We just don’t have a source big enough for 10 kiloamps. And it’s not important because you see how small the tapes are. If you want to do 20 kiloamps, 30, it’s not a problem. Like you’re talking microns, you know, when you can wrap this tape, we can spiral wrap it. So we’ve developed a supply chain that can, you know, develop the cable system quite easily for demonstration purposes. And then for us, it’s about de risking and partnering with progressive utilities.
MB: Let me test something. We talked about undergrounding transmission, we talked about the cables heating up. Does that have an implication for spacing for undergrounding? For large power things, even in DC?
JF: It has huge implications. There was a project, the European Commission have Horizon projects that they run and in 2018 they ran a project called Best Paths and it was a demonstration of a 320kV, which is a standard enough HVDC transmission for lots of interconnectors are 320kV DC. The Celtic interconnector I talked about would be 320kV DC. So there’s a good few of them around. And they did that with a superconductor at 10 kiloamps. And all you have to do with DC, it’s much easier than AC, is multiply the 10 by the 320. You get 3.2 gigawatts on a single cable. For DC you need a plus and a minus. So you get a plus and a minus cable. You put them in a 1 meter trench and they can convey 6.4 gigawatts at 320 KB.
MB: A 1 meter trench.
JF: A 1 meter trench. And with that you can reduce the size of the converter stations because voltage drives scale. So if you’ve got 525kV DC, everything gets bigger. You know, the stacks of IGB get taller, the spacing between different voltages gets bigger. So if you can reduce the voltage, like voltage drive scale, in many jurisdictions voltage is a proxy for scale. If you’re below a certain voltage, you’re exempt. Planning.
MB: Well, if we take that 1 meter trench and just put it on its own right of way or for, or something. So you maybe have a 5 meter wide thing or a 10 meter wide thing, how much space would you need for the same power through, you know, standard non superconducting direct current?
JF: So because the current is limited to about, let’s say two kiloamps and you would probably do at this comparable voltages, you would do a gigawatt per cable pair at 525kV, which is the highest voltage, they operate underground DC cables at. You would, you would need three pairs of cables. So you would need three trenches or three. You would probably put the cables apart from another. So you would need a lot more, you need a much bigger space.
MB: So three sets and if I’m understanding this correctly, the ground is going to conduct heat. Three cables running at potentially 90 Celsius are going to be heating up the ground.
JF: So you separate them. So you wouldn’t co locate them in a 3 meter trench, you would put them in spaces apart from one another. And for logistical reasons you would want to maintain them separately because you have a different cable, you might want to take one out, do some maintenance on it, whatever. So you would want different access or arrangements for different cables. So you might need 10 meters and in some instances, and I’m not sure why, but 22 meters is the trench section. They’ve shown for some 4 gigawatt infrastructure in countries because they want to be able to do a full repair of one cable without upsetting the other cable.
JF: But if you’ve got 6 gigawatts on a pair of cables, you can lose the whole thing. So you’ve got to be prepared. Certainly in a 1 meter trench you can get to a lot more places. It’s like distribution scale infrastructure.
MB: I remember when I was thinking about it for the book, because I contributed a little bit to the second edition, one of the discussions was around what are the decision points for different types of technologies. And certainly that key thing was for the denser the urban area, the more value there is for a superconducting cable because you’ve got all this stuff, you’ve got to underground it regardless of what else it is from one thing or another. But then you’ve got this heat thing that expands the stuff and so this just makes it very much easier to get massive amounts of power moved around in densely populated areas.
JF: That’s why urban congestion was the first application of superconductors because they were limited in range because of the corrugations. They’re great products doing a great job, but they’re limited in range and also they’re limited in pressure rating. So you can’t put them in a submarine environment because you need higher pressures. If you’ve got a galvanized pipe, you put a lot of pressure in, it’s going to just bulge. The technology that Supernode has, it’s rated for, you know, we tested it at cryogenic temperatures up to 90 bars and we couldn’t test it any higher because we couldn’t find tests. But 90 bars is plenty high. It’s way above what state of the art can achieve today. So we’re pleased with its performance.
MB: 90 bars is 900 meters under the surface of the sea.
JF: Now we’re not planning to do that. There are other issues that arise when you start putting things that far down.
MB: Personally, I wouldn’t put something where you required cryogenic nitrogen chillers and compressors at the bottom of the ocean, even every 30 kilometers. It wouldn’t be the preferred solution set in my brain for that.
JF: Interesting, because we have a lot of people doing great work on Supernode. We’re also lucky to have two stalwart investors in Volnay, which is Eddie O’Connor’s family wealth fund and also Aker Horizons. Aker do a lot of subsea engineering because they’ve been involved in servicing the oil and gas industry in the past and they’ve done a pre feed design for us for a submarine liquid nitrogen pod which you know, will hit the 99.9% reliability. The system has been designed to operate at 100 meters. That’s the design basis for our technology. So our submarine and our terrestrial technology is the very same. It’s just different outer casing.
You can do it and you can extend it beyond 30km too, so you can take it to 50. There’s some other tricks you can do, probably not in a submarine setting to extend the extent of passive cooling, but you have to evacuate some of the liquid nitrogen and let it become gaseous and capture.
MB: We mentioned the Pearl River Delta crossing the river with massive amounts of power from across the Yangtze or the Yellow Rivers crossing the Thames to bridge some of that stuff to allow power. That would be an obvious use case.
JF: And the power tunnels, like cities like Berlin and London are, they need to electrify, they need to move more power around. Cities like Dublin, like lots of cities need to move more power around and you know, to put a power tunnel in for conventional so that the heat can be evacuated from tunnels and you need tunnels big enough to drive through to service them. And everything like that costs a lot of money.
JF: It’s not just the cost of the cable, it’s the cost of the full lifetime lifecycle costs of the whole project. A superconducting cable might be more expensive per km, but when you look at the installation and what’s required at both ends in terms of substation upgrades and transformers and so on, it can be quite economic in an urban setting. If you take it out into open country and you’re competing kilometer for kilometer. You asked a question about the 6.4. How many cables? We think at 3 gigawatts superconductor is cheaper without real estate constraints or anything. If you just wanted to move power from A to B, if you wanted to move 3 gigawatts underground. Overhead, we can’t compete with that.
MB: But that’s the point, right? The super grid concept is a mesh grid overlying the existing transmission for Europe to enable power to flow with low resistance from wherever it is in Europe. Then there’s a surplus to wherever there’s a demand. And that includes, as we’ve talked about Canada, we haven’t talked about Morocco up to the UK but you know, right now there’s the interconnector under the Black Sea approved between Romania and Georgia, there’s the one that’s under construction from Greece to Israel. You know, the MedGrid is being finally built.
JF: I’m going to put on my old system operator hat here. There’s a thing that causes difficulty for consumers when you lose too much active power from a system at any one point in time. It happens everywhere. The bigger the system, the more active power you can withstand. Losing mega projects from Desertec, bringing power from Morocco to Europe and putting more than 3 or 4 gigawatts on a single link, it’s very much mission critical. If the tech, if there’s any problem with the cables, the project’s gone. The rationale behind grids is having meshed national grids so that if you lose a cable you can still bring it back.
What we advocate for is not long point to points but having parallel paths and then you can have much more power and if you lose it, the rest of the network can pick up the slack so the customers don’t lose the full amount of what disappears off a cable. So lots of cables, multiple cables to places like Morocco make a lot of sense. A lot of power on a single cable doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
MB: I was listening to one of the people who’s developing I think their third UK or British Isles to European connector. I’m terrible with names. Ludlam, Simon.
JF: Simon Ludlam. Yeah, I know Simon.
MB: I think I was on a call with him at one point and he was saying that in their case they’re doing 200 megawatt cables. Simply so because for where it’s terminating they can lose 200 megawatts and not be concerned. As we look at NATO-L, as we’ve been discussing with Laurent, it’s multiple cables. Cornelis indicates that for HVDC it’s turning into kind of 2 gigawatts per cable is kind of the average?
JF: Kind of the average. If you look at the end game and you look at the targets, you know, 300 gigawatts in the North Sea with two gigawatt cables. That’s spaghetti junction.
There aren’t enough landfalls. How many people do you want to upset? You’d be digging up everyone’s back garden, everyone’s beach, then there’s all the environmental constraints you have. There’s other infrastructure, there’s other needs. There aren’t that many landfalls available. I’ve developed interconnection and I can remember there were two or three good spots and you know, the two or three good spots, they’re probably gone because some offshore renewable developer or some gas developer or someone else got it. So it’s not like 2 gigawatt technology is fine. It’ll get you to 2030. But I think ultimately the toolbox needs to be developed. We need bigger cables, we need three, four, five.
That piece of research I talked about, the infinite bus bar. One of the challenges with that was it wasn’t a network. So we did another piece of research where we got a computer programmer to come in and develop a network. And we said, okay, you’re going to have 100 nodes, you’re going to have to develop, connect up all the nodes, here’s your renewable targets, here’s your batteries, here’s all your scenarios, 2019 weather data. Keep the lights on 95% of the time. Develop a network. The network came up and there were power corridors. And then we said, okay, split the power corridors and start off with the entire corridors lost. What happens? And bang, straight away, 3 gigawatts was exceeded because it was a 10 gigawatt corridor. So that’s not acceptable.
So we said, keep reducing the size of the circuit because we think circuit lens is a proxy for cost. Naturally you assume you’ve got to open the road, you’ve got to develop the infrastructure and so on. And we kept reducing it until there were the largest circuit size, where when you lost that circuit, it didn’t hit the overall system by more than 3 gigawatts. This is the active loss thing I talked about before. And depending on the assumptions around max circuit size, the average across Europe was somewhere between 6 and 8 gigawatts. So if 6 to 8 gigawatt tech is what you need. We think superconductivity is well placed to deliver that because we think we’re cheaper than copper or aluminum aluminium underground cables at 3 gigawatts.
The strange thing about our technology, what’s weird and wonderful about it, is that to double the size of a superconducting cable from 3 to 6 gigawatts, you don’t need to double the amount of infrastructure, just the amount of tape. And the tape only costs about 10% of the cost of the system.
MB: And the tape is literally just tape.
JF: And your OPEX increase is zero because your OPEX is not associated decoupled from power transfer. Your OPEX is associated with the geometry of the cable which is dictated by voltage.
JF: What it really lends itself to, Michael, is anticipatory investment because people have struggled to build cables and leave them, you know, lying there and capacity is gobbled up and who’s going to pay for it? And all these wrestles with this technology, I think if we get it to market, when we get it to market, it’s going to be a real asset for system operators and utilities in providing the anticipatory investment that the market sorely needs so we can develop a consistent pipeline of renewables.
MB: In discussions with India, they don’t curtail their massive solar farms that are pouring solar energy into Delhi because they built the pipes first in anticipation of the scale of the new projects. And in China they’re finally getting curtailment again. Well, it’s getting 5% curtailment after massive development.
JF: Welcome to Europe. We’re getting double digit curtailment in lots of markets.
MB: India and China are not curtailing anything near what we’re seeing in the developed world because they knew this and they planned ahead. And one of my messages is we in the developed world have got to learn that from them.
JF: I know.
MB: We’re coming near the end of our time. A couple more questions. The first question, how far away are you from having a commercial product?
JF: Yeah, great question. We’re TRL5 testing at the moment. Next year we’ll do a full demo. Two things I come back to, we’d love to get a commercial product sooner rather than later, but it’s not an easy market to break into. We do know that we’ve got the best cryogenic technology for superconducting projects anywhere. So we may partner with an existing superconducting cable company to put some of our technology in the market. And that is probably how we’ll approach the market. We have been approached by a number of potential customers who have a problem they want us to look at. We want to pick the right one because these projects, they’ll take a lot of time. So by the end of the decade we want to have projects in commercial service.
MB: One thing that I keep meaning to ask, you kept saying that Munich was the one that’s being developed and was the biggest one. But what other already exist and are operating?
JF: There are pockets and typically they are co located where there’s a superconducting community and a bit of push and pull from the utility. So in Korea, in Seoul and there’s a Shingle project. They also have a DC demonstrator and some data center projects under development at this point in time. And LS Cables will be the promoter of those projects with KEPCO being the client. There was a Long island project in New York, just a ComEd project in Chicago, the Superlint project. There was an Ampacity project in Essen which ran for seven years reliably in Essen. So there’s probably. There’s one in Russia and there’s one or two in Japan. So does China as well in China have one under. Under development as we speak? I don’t know if it’s operational yet.
MB: I thought I’d heard it was.
JF: And there are some industrial ones as well, so that are. That are off grid. Yeah, they must be developed.
MB: When I was asked to participate in the second edition [of the book Supergrid Super Solution], I mean I knew about Supernode, about your product. I nerded out about superconducting, but I just assumed that no superconducting transmission was in operation. But I found out there was.
JF: I would say there are more distribution solutions at this point in time and moving into transmission. I think Superlink is a step change and that project and the whole community want to see that project succeed. There’s VAR who are a startup of a similar vintage to ourselves in America and they have a project connecting with AC overhead superconducting project in, I’m not sure the whereabouts, could be Massachusetts, but it’s certainly in that corner of the big old USA. So they have a project there. There are projects and with electrification there’s more of a push to, you know, improve, let you know, to increase the share of the market from 25 to 75%. So let’s just say there’s plenty of need.
MB: Last thing, I always leave my guests the opportunity, an open ended thing, something we didn’t touch on or something you just want to share because you’ve got a big audience. What would you say to them?
JF: I would say in Europe and in the States and other geographies as well. I think we need to ask the policymakers, I would, if there are any policymakers listening and politicians for sure, ask them to look back from the end and to explore the gaps there are between where we want to be and what the end solution looks like. Incrementing your way forwards isn’t always the best way of getting to where you want to be. And so I would ask for that in terms of here in Europe, the Innovation Fund, it takes a lot of money and gives it right back to hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. And I would say give some to the electricity networks. We need it.
The system operators, the utilities, I guess they’ve been encouraged to say I got this and maybe they need to be a bit more. I could do with some help or maybe I need more help. Certainly we’d like to see innovative transmission technology more promoted, more supported and more cherished in this part of the world than it feels today.
MB: Excellent. This has been Redefining Energy Tech. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today has been John Fitzgerald who is actually building superconducting transmission, which is really nerdy. Cool. And so until next time, John, thank you so much.
JF: Thanks for keeping me on point.
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