The World Changing Podcast

[00:00:00] Gary: and even when you go to a hundred percent renewable, you know what's working in the background.
[00:00:05] Greg: Wait,
[00:00:05] Gary: Say that again. You go to a hundred percent renewable generation, you know what's working in the background, what You have to have a battery.
[00:00:15] Gary: You have to have something that can maintain voltage and frequency. Something that can steady or absorb the variation. Even if you're operating at a hundred percent. There is some variability in wind and solar. A cloud, a wind speed. Well
[00:00:29] Greg: Welcome to the World Changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it, we'll keep it anyway. How about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, Then we can take that out. Welcome to the World Changing podcast, where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon-free future.
[00:00:59] Greg: We'll [00:01:00] talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co-founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company, and on the other side of the camera here, we. Flo Lumsden our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.
[00:01:25] Greg: Okay, everybody, I am so excited for this episode. We have Gary Ratcliffe. Gary Ratcliffe is the Vice President of Market Development and Innovation at Hitachi Energy. Hitachi Energy is responsible, or at least their technology underlies. Half of the top 250 power utilities in the world.
[00:01:50] Greg: I met Gary. Through a project that Aston Labs is working on. It's one of those projects where, and I guess [00:02:00] we talk about it a little bit in the episode conceptually where we're trying to do some really big industrial applications. With zero fossil fuels and very high uptime at an affordable price because, industrial customers won't stand for anything else. you know, when you're gonna do something that complex you bring in people like Gary Ratcliffe. That's how we met.
[00:02:28] Greg: I mean Obviously hold him in very high esteem, his team and the company, up until recently, it was called abb and I've known ABB since the minute that I walked into electricity industry.
[00:02:39] Greg: the grid. How do you decarbonize the grid
[00:02:43] Greg: One of the biggest. Pieces that's missing from this conversation of getting rid of fossil fuels getting rid of carbon on our grid is transmission. We're starting to see articles about it.
[00:02:54] Greg: even today. It in the New York Times, we've seen it in The Economist, and this [00:03:00] missing piece is transmission. So we have Gary Ratcliffe to talk about that piece the grid it's one of the most complex machines that we've ever built.
[00:03:13] Greg: We have complex problems, which obviously is going to include complex answers. And Gary helps us pick apart all of these pieces
[00:03:23] Greg: Uh, In this episode, Gary's gonna give us this real story of his career evolution,
[00:03:28] Greg: but we need to start with his list of credentials. Gary currently holds a position of the VP of Market Development and Innovation for North America at Hitachi Energy.
[00:03:41] Greg: Gary focuses on the energy transition, modernizing the grid. Is an industry leader and serves as the expert advisor to utilities, government agencies, and industry associations on the best practices for clean energy grid modernization, smart grids and digitalization.
[00:03:58] Greg: Gary's a member [00:04:00] of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Advisory Committee for the Department of Commerce. He's on the GridWise Alliance Technical Council, the E four Carolinas Innovation Council, and the International Electro Technical Commission's Smart Energy Systems Committee, where he serves as a technical advisor.
[00:04:17] Greg: Gary hold's bachelor's degree in Electric power engineering from RPI and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon. He's a registered professional engineer, i e e, senior member. Has co-authored a transmission and distribution planning book and has written numerous technical papers and articles on the topic.
[00:04:35] Flo: Why has it been a big deal to get Gary on the show?
[00:04:40] Greg: The reason it was a big deal to get Gary on the show probably stems from some kind of like deep insecurity of my own, which is that a lot of circles that I'm in, people ask me questions about electricity and I'm supposed to have the answers.
[00:04:57] Greg: And then when I talk to Gary, I feel like I have no [00:05:00] answers. I just have questions and I want, I, it's been a big deal to have Gary on the show obviously I'm excited to ask these questions, but then also just like I don't think I've been as nervous to have a record to record somebody on the podcast as I was for Gary, because I was just like, man, some of these topics are so deep and complex, and I don't wanna lose that complexity, yeah, that's why,
[00:05:26] Flo: , and I love, you know, once I really wrap my head around the terms that I'm gonna share in this intro, I could follow along. Maybe not to the degree someone who's in this industry all the time could, but I learned a lot and I think that's empowering, as someone who wants to support efforts to make the grid.
[00:05:49] Flo: More environmentally friendly more efficient and smarter. It's empowering to know what our options are and if there's an opportunity to [00:06:00] support those. So I hope that folks who aren't in the industry will also try to get through this with us, cuz it's a, it's a great learning opportunity.
[00:06:09] Greg: Yeah. Um, that was a good spot. Flow's gonna help us with some definitions and hope you enjoyed the episode
[00:06:19] Flo: All right. So one of my goals for this show is to make these conversations a little bit more followible for anyone like me, who may not be in the industry, but wants to learn. So I wanted to define a few terms these are also in the show notes. We talk a lot about transmission and distribution in this conversation. So a transmission line carries electric energy from one point to another and an electric power system.
[00:06:45] Flo: They can also carry alternating current or direct current, or a combination of both transmission lines are important for moving energy around. HVDC or a high voltage direct current electric power transmission system. Offers [00:07:00] long distance, power, transmission, improved integrity of renewable energy and the ability to connect different power grids together.
[00:07:10] Flo: Solar PV. So PV stands for photo-voltaic and it gets its name from the process. Of converting light photons to electricity. Which is also called the full tow voltaic effect. This is another fancy way to describe solar power. Load versus generation. Load is another word for the demand for electricity on the power grid at any given time.
[00:07:34] Flo: Or it's the total electricity being consumed or removed from the grid by the users of the grid. Dispatchable power versus non dispatchable power comes up a lot in this conversation as well. These two terms, refer to the ability of a power source to be controlled and adjusted, to meet fluctuating demand for electricity.
[00:07:56] Flo: Dispatchable power sources currently include fossil fuels, [00:08:00] hydrogen geothermal, and biomass power. Non dispatchable power. Also known as intermittent.
[00:08:06] Flo: Or a variable sources.
[00:08:09] Flo: Are those that can not be easily controlled or scheduled to match the electricity demand. Examples include solar power, wind power wave, and tidal power. These fall into the non dispatchable category because their availability is, is influenced by weather conditions and natural phenomenon.
[00:08:27] Flo: We talk a lot about gigawatts of power. So how much can one gigawatt power? How can we think about that in every everyday terms? So one gigawatt is enough to power about 70 500,000 homes. Or three quarters of a million homes can be powered by one gigawatt. I like to keep that in mind, because when we're throwing around 13 gigawatts of power, that's a lot of power.
[00:08:50] Flo: Lastly a hundred percent uptime, refers to the reliability of the power supplied. It is referring to perfect or near perfect reliability with no power outages. [00:09:00] All right, let's get going.
[00:09:04] Greg: You've spent, is it fair to say you've spent all of your career in power in probably fair power grid? I was just gonna, I was just gonna stop and be like, why? No. I always have to ask everybody this question. What, was there something as a kid that you did or that you were exposed to or that your parents did or they exposed you to that kind of prepared you or led you into what you do?
[00:09:34] Greg: Today and that can be what led you to going into power grid work or even for today. Is there something that you were exposed to as a kid that helps you in this? I mean, There's a lot of change right now in this industry, I'm assuming from Absolutely. From when you exciting today, right?
[00:09:50] Greg: Yeah. Is there anything from that you can point to in your, of your younger years that led you to
[00:09:55] Gary: this? I'm not sure. Maybe, my father was an electrician. Okay.[00:10:00] When I was in school, did well in what people now call STEM courses. Mm-hmm. So logical, I guess up career path for me was to go to an engineering school and get an engineering degree.
[00:10:13] Gary: Yeah. And I decided since my father was an electrician, maybe I would focus on electrical engineering. Yeah. But I made a decision early on once I was at the college where I did my undergraduate work. An electrical engineering, there's electronics, and then there's everything else, right? Yeah.
[00:10:29] Gary: , I guess this happened because of, again, my father. He was very focused on getting job experience. And when I graduated from college, he absolutely wanted me to have a job so that he, the office pay payroll, gainfully employed, cost recovery, if you will, on, on cost of the tuition
[00:10:48] Gary: he was all in on that. I think he might have been happier if I'd gone to a school in Boston that had mandatory co-op jobs. Oh, okay. So as a freshman, he insisted that [00:11:00] I go to the co-op office Yeah. And sign up. And I said, I told him, I said, they don't interview freshman.
[00:11:07] Gary: Freshman don't get co-op jobs. Yeah. As it turned out, I was wrong and he was right. So I did go to the co-op office. I did fill out the form and as a freshman and the person in the office said, oh, do you want to meet our co-op advisor? Not the guy who ran it, but he was the assistant co-op program director at the school.
[00:11:31] Gary: And I said, I'm a freshman. She said, oh, he's available. Why don't you go in and meet with him? So I went and talked with him and he said, talked about what I was doing and, that I was basically focusing on electrical engineering, but hadn't really decided on electronics or power.
[00:11:44] Gary: But as it turned out, who knew he actually knew my father rather well and actually knew me at that time. 15 years when I was like three years [00:12:00] old. Wow. Yeah. And didn't think much of it. I said, yeah I'll mention to my dad, I saw you and talked with you, and I'll tell him, you sent your guards.
[00:12:07] Gary: Anyway I got a call late in my freshman year. Do you want to go to work for Boston Edison, which is the utility in the Boston area. He's now part of Eversource. And I did, so I took the fall semester of my sophomore year, and I went to work for a utility. And had that early exposure where the program I had, they had me doing everything for going out to test power transformers before they were energized to checking accuracy of meters working in one of their yards. And then I went back and worked for them the following three summers. And so had a lot of exposure to the power facilities, power engineering side, which reinforced the program.
[00:12:51] Gary: And as it turned out the school I went to, I would argue, had the number one power engineering program literally in the world while I was there, because [00:13:00] half of the class my graduate year was foreign students. Wow. And went to work for Westinghouse Electric.
[00:13:07] Greg: And Westinghouse Electric became,
[00:13:11] Gary: so the Westinghouse or the Westing Electric t and d company became.
[00:13:16] Gary: What was called Westinghouse, ABB Power t and d Company. Then they dropped the Westinghouse. Yep. And basically became abb. And then in 2020 ab BBB and Hitachi formed a joint venture with Hitachi having majority ownership of that joint venture at 80%. last December they bought out the remaining 20%.
[00:13:36] Gary: So where I started basically that business, that t and d business continued from Westinghouse to abb, and now it's a hundred percent Hitachi owned. Wow.
[00:13:47] Greg: And some things have changed since you started in there. Few
[00:13:50] Gary: things have changed. Just a few. I think the biggest things that have changed is the digital technologies over.
[00:13:56] Gary: Yes. Over the time period and what we do with computers [00:14:00] today. My phone has more power than the computer I used when I first started working. Yeah. I think the digital communication technologies. Yeah. that's transforming our industry.
[00:14:12] Gary: When people ask me what I do, my job title is, you know, market development and innovation, but what I do is I work on the energy transition and we've talked about that. Yeah. Decarbonization of generation and decarbonization of energy in use consumption. Yeah. But the other part is, uh, I, I focused a lot previously on smart grid technology.
[00:14:30] Gary: Yeah. Which has evolved into grid modernization. Yeah. One key part of that is resiliency, cuz climate change, even though we're trying to mitigate it it's here. It's here. Yeah. And it's impacting utilities, more storms, more severe storms. More trees, more trees. Trees is an issue. But that issue has been around for a long time.
[00:14:52] Gary: Maybe more Trees
[00:14:53] Greg: coming down. Yeah, more trees. Sorry, I just
[00:14:56] Flo: had like trauma. This tree that keeps falling on my
[00:14:58] Gary: house. [00:15:00] Yeah so trees are an issue. It's actually probably one of the biggest components of grid reliability. Yeah. Because most outages for in use customers occur at the distribution level.
[00:15:11] Gary: Yeah. Just more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more flooding, more extreme cold, more extreme heat. Mm-hmm. All of those are impacting the grid. Yeah. And so resiliency is really part of what we call license to operate. You need to be addressing resiliency. You also need to address reliability.
[00:15:30] Gary: A big component of that is aging infrastructure, making sure that your equipment is performing reliably, but then you also have improving efficiency, addressing power quality issues. Yeah. And the other big issue which I relate to, grid modernization is just the security piece. Yeah. Both physical and cyber.
[00:15:47] Gary: Yeah. But in underpinning both grid modernization as well as the energy transition is what we can do digitally. And you didn't ask this, but one of the benefits of being part of Hitachi is [00:16:00] we come to the table in Hitachi energy with the equipment, the systems ability to service what we sell, et cetera.
[00:16:08] Gary: But Hitachi is has an IT component right? To the company. Hitachi Ventera is what it's called, plus another operation, which is called Global Logic, which was a recent acquisition. Which gives us tremendous IT capability to compliment our operational technology. So this thing of it, ot.
[00:16:29] Greg: definition
[00:16:30] Flo: question. Yeah. Ot, operational technology,
[00:16:32] Gary: and it is information informational technology. Yep.
[00:16:35] Gary: We just got a huge booster shot Yeah. When we joined Hitachi because of their IT capabilities really to address this concept of digitalization. Yeah.
[00:16:47] Greg: Yeah, so the high level stats of Hitachi energy are mind boggling when I. Was looking online, I started seeing these numbers that [00:17:00] were insane. So to say that you have some involvement in the power industry is an understatement.
[00:17:07] Greg: What are the high level stats of Hitachi energy? How much of the global power. Grids. Do you have an impact on, or your technologies
[00:17:15] Gary: involved in so Hitachi Energy is known as being a major supplier or the major supplier to the utility market, primarily transmission and distribution.
[00:17:26] Gary: But there's a few areas that we really dominate the market in my opinion. One is we're the leading global provider of Hvdc technology and power quality solutions. So that's really part of our equipment side of our business. Also we're the number one global supplier of transformers. So these range from power transformers to distribution, transformers to traction transformers for example, for rail applications.
[00:17:51] Gary: But globally we're the largest supplier of transformers. So the equipment piece of our business is. Very significant. But that said[00:18:00] we also have IT and software solutions. 50% of the top 250 global utilities use our software.
[00:18:09] Greg: Half of the 250 largest global
[00:18:12] Gary: utilities are using our software.
[00:18:15] Gary: And then we talk about these days, iot, we talk about, digitalization and we have $4 trillion of assets that we're managing and optimizing with our software solutions from our grid automation business. So we're not only the leading equipment provider, the apparatus, the equipment, the breakers, the transformers, but we're also very much focused on digitalization IT solutions and optimizing and managing the grid.
[00:18:47] Gary: Wow.
[00:18:49] Greg: We're gonna dig into some of this stuff later, but basically that means. When the power grid is running every single day and we're all flipping our lights on whenever we want to do that, your [00:19:00] technology is sitting out there making sure that when that happens, these lights come on. We can do podcasts.
[00:19:10] Gary: Sure. I'd like to say that we're responsible for keeping the lights on, but we provide the infrastructure and we provide the software that enables, your local utility provider to make sure that your lights light. Is that
[00:19:21] Greg: the primary customer target is the utility company or do you do, like you'd mentioned rail are most of these kind of quasi-governmental agencies that you're working with or do you have private
[00:19:34] Gary: customers as well?
[00:19:34] Gary: No, I think there's two parts to, to our business. One is we do serve the utilities and To a lesser extent, maybe generation, but generation has to connect to the grid. So certainly the utilities are a major part of our, our customer base. But the other part of our customer base is what I would call energy intensive market verticals, oil and gas, mining, pharmaceuticals Data centers, these are all energy [00:20:00] intensive market verticals. And because of the amount of energy that they consume, they need more infrastructure to be able to deliver and then to manage that, on their side of the meter.
[00:20:11] Gary: So that's the other key part of our business. We do provide solutions for electrification of rail and transportation. And then, companies that are heavy consumers of electricity and then also the utilities that are supplying it.
[00:20:26] Greg: I kind of wanna talk about rail, but that's only because I'm curious. I'm gonna go to,
[00:20:33] Gary: Rail in the US is not terribly electrified. There's a lot of upside potential for electrifying rail in the US just, yeah. Europe is much, much higher.
[00:20:42] Greg: Yeah. Being down in North Carolina, when we were thinking of moving to this region, one thing I saw was like, when are we gonna get a light rail in this area? And I, now that I've lived here for a little while, I think the answer is we're not I don't know
[00:20:58] a
[00:20:58] Gary: little bit about that. You do? Oh, [00:21:00] never say never. It keeps getting looked at. But, you know what would make sense?
[00:21:04] Gary: Just at a high level, we're in the research triangle, so why don't you connect the three points Yeah. Of the research triangle with rail.
[00:21:11] Greg: Is this happening,
[00:21:12] Flo: Gary? I I'm gonna start another podcast. Looking for funding.
[00:21:16] Gary: Yes. Funding. Funding would be a good thing. And then the other thing is it's gotta connect to the airport.
[00:21:24] Gary: Yeah. If I could hop on a rail line here in Apex and get to the airport with a light rail solution, even if I had to go into Raleigh and then go back out to the airport. But didn't you make a difference? Yeah. You know, It would be handy. Just, yeah. I think a lot of people would, would select that option of getting to the airport rather than fighting the traffic, particularly when you're being picked up.
[00:21:46] Gary: But the airport
[00:21:47] Flo: makes all of its money from the parking lot so that there's the, that's the rubs minimize the power dynamic rub that we're coming up against.
[00:21:58] Gary: They do make [00:22:00] money, I'm assuming, from their parking lots in the parking garages. Yeah. Doesn't,
[00:22:04] Greg: they don't, yeah.
[00:22:05] Flo: They're not incentivized
[00:22:07] Greg: to bring, they need to call the Seattle people.
[00:22:08] Greg: They seem to, they put a light rail right into the parking lot there. You can walk, you can take the light rail and walk by all the parked vehicles. And, I, that would be, I really, I we don't have to go down the rail. No, I know rabbit hole. But I do think like electric rail in some of these places, especially just seeing people moving all over the country, it's there's certain hotspots that are blowing up.
[00:22:30] Greg: And, Anyway, I digress. E every time that we talk, the concept of H V D C comes up and I thought what would be interesting is to go back to just some of the big headlines that we've seen come out in Wall Street Journal in New York Times is the dream of renewables is being blocked by these lengthy interconnection queues. So first, I know we're gonna have to take a huge step back, but what is [00:23:00] an interconnection queue and why is this blocking our renewable dreams from coming true?
[00:23:07] Gary: So the interconnection queue is basically A, a queue of companies that want to connect generation resources or assets to the transmission grid. Typically there needs to be a study to determine if there's a sufficient capacity and what would be the impact of connecting that generation to the grid.
[00:23:29] Gary: To determine whether or not the grid at that location can accommodate that resource. A study needs to be done.
[00:23:37] Gary: So these get queued up as part of the approval process. So that's what the, that's what the interconnection queue is.
[00:23:45] Greg: And it's backed up.
[00:23:46] Gary: It's worse in some areas than others. It depends upon how many generation resources want to connect to the grid within a particular area. Typically, if it's connecting where there's a, an independent system [00:24:00] operator or an RTO regional transmission operator, they may have limited resources in terms of processing and evaluating these interconnection requests.
[00:24:08] Gary: In order to move forward and connect them into the grid.
[00:24:12] Greg: And so then that's how it's been done for for quite a while at least. I know that the transmission operators and those were kind a new thing that came about was that post deregulation or was that happening before?
[00:24:26] Greg: Yeah, I think it was part
[00:24:26] Gary: of, I guess going back, I think it was part of deregulation. Yeah. Where now instead of having vertically integrated utilities, you had a deregulated infrastructure where you had generation owners, and then you have transmission and distribution wires companies. And they own those assets.
[00:24:44] Gary: And then you have an independent grid operator, an independent system operator, responsible for the dispatch of generation having a market so that you have the most economic dispatch. And then of course you have to manage the transmission grid because [00:25:00] that's where your constraints come from.
[00:25:02] Gary: Yeah. There's a term terminology that's used it's called security constrained unit commitment. Security and the constraint and the security in this case is security of the transmission grid, security of grid operation, and you wanna make sure that when you operate the grid, that you have the ability to withstand.
[00:25:22] Gary: Single or even potentially double contingencies. And still be able to maintain the integrity and the operation of the grid.
[00:25:29] Gary: Because if you lose any one of those pieces, you still need to be able to maintain the integrity and continue to deliver power.
[00:25:36] Greg: Yeah, that is a, that's a hard problem that in my life of being in startups or talking sometimes to financiers who know nothing about the power grid is this one concept that all of these things have to be in perfect balance or very close to perfect balance all the time, every millisecond of every day.
[00:25:57] Greg: And that creates a really interesting [00:26:00] economic or market dynamic that doesn't really exist when you can throw something in a warehouse or you can, like most other markets, if you make something and nobody buys it, it ends up filling up a storage unit somewhere and shut down the business and no big deal, but in power.