Is new tech the key to modernizing old power grids?

Markham interviews Eran Inbar, CEO of Israel-based Prisma Photonics. 

What is Energi Talks?

Journalist Markham Hislop interviews leading energy experts from around the world about the energy transition and climate change.

Markham: 00:04

Welcome to episode 268 of the Energy Talks podcast. I'm energy and climate journalist, Markham Hislop. Yesterday, I interviewed analyst Anders Hovey of the Oxford Institute For Energy Studies about China's aggressive EV industry, which got us talking about the country's electricity system. Turns out that just like the United States, China has plenty of challenges ahead already as it rapidly scales up wind and solar energy. The US power grid has been in the news for a few years, thanks to high profile outages in California and Texas that only serve to illustrate the work ahead to modernize the creaky old American grid.

Markham: 00:45

Can foreign startups with innovative new technologies be part of the answer in the US, and perhaps part of the answer in Canada? In this episode, I'll try to answer that question during my conversation with Aaron Embar, CEO of Israel based Prisma Photonics. So welcome to the interview, Aaron. Alright. Sorry.

Markham: 01:07

I will get it right.

Aaron: 01:08

Yeah.

Markham: 01:09

I I joke, you know, I often we we do a lot of interviews with with people outside of North America, and of course, my flat Western Canadian tongue gets me into trouble all the time, so my my apologies. But

Aaron: 01:22

Absolutely.

Markham: 01:23

Let's talk about the fun stuff. Now look, I've done a lot of interviews about the American grid and and with economic modelers and energy modelers who say that for advanced economies like the US, by 2050, they're going to require 2 to 3 times as much electricity as the transportation gets electrified, as, building, heating you know, space heating gets electrified with heat pumps, industrial processes, on and on and on. We're gonna need a lot more electricity, and the question then becomes the role of transmission. And this is an interesting debate, because on the one hand, even the IEA says we're gonna need a lot of new transmission. And on the other hand, there are plenty of advocates out there who talk about distributed energy resources.

Markham: 02:12

So are we gonna be using microgrids? Are we gonna be using, self generation by big industrial and commercial, plants that can, you know, install solar on their roof and then have batteries out in the in the shed, those sorts of things. What's so in a in a very broad sense, what's your take on where we're going with this, shift to clean electricity and the role that transmission will play in it?

Aaron: 02:41

Yeah. So I think that, you know, microgrid and other aspect definitely will help, but the major major aspect is still the backbone is the transmission line. And here, we we're seeing a huge shift when when we're shifting into renewables. You know, suddenly, we need to transfer, power over thousands of kilometers because we're not generating power what we need, but rather what we have, wind and solar. And this is a completely different problem.

Aaron: 03:11

And suddenly, the grid become or the transmission line become a real bottleneck for the removable into or or the the shift into net zero grid.

Markham: 03:22

One of the points that's that's been made, quite often, and I came across this in an International Energy Agency presentation on integrating, wind and solar into power grids, and it said that there were 6 phases, and the first two phases are just minimal integration of, variable renewable, energy. So the first you can you know, system operators can plan ahead, and there's things that they can do. It's not really onerous. But once you get into phase 3, maybe you've got, 10, 12, 15% of renewables, then it's a different game. Now you have to start reengineering your grid.

Markham: 04:03

You've gotta look at storage. You've gotta look at your market structure. You have to look at new transmission so that you can trade with your neighbors, on and on and on. There's a a lot of things that have to be done, And the the higher the percentage of of variable energy in your power grid, the more you have to reengineer it. You renewables are not a drop in replacement for thermal capacity.

Markham: 04:27

Would you agree with that?

Aaron: 04:29

Absolutely. And I think that the problem is already here. We can see, for example, that in any given moment in the US, we have something like 10,000 renewable energy projects that are waiting in the queue to be connected to the grid. So it's it's it's right now a problem. And as we will shift to more and more renewables energies as EV cars would take a a a more dominant part in the transportation, that would become a huge problem.

Markham: 04:57

What does technological revolution in the power sector mean to Prisma? And the reason I ask this question is I've been hearing for years now that the power sector is going through its own technological revolution. There are all sorts of innovative new technologies, and I assume your approach will be will be one of them. I hear about grid enhancing technologies, so you make more use of the power grid that you have. But what is from your point of view, what is technological revolution in power?

Markham: 05:28

What does that mean?

Aaron: 05:29

I think in in one word, it's data. Because probably in the in the in the long term, probably we will build new transmission lines and enhance the capacity in the, I would say, brute force way, but that will take several decades. Right now, what we can do is start to use data in order to optimize what we have right now. Because, practically, the greatest capability to a much higher capacity than, than it is today, but the limiting factor is data.

Markham: 05:58

Do you find in your conversations in the US that regulators, regional transmission organizations, utilities are open to changing the way they've done business for the last, I don't know, 125 years. I mean, the the I I would think it would say the electrical utilities have a reputation, at least in North America, for having a very conservative culture that's rooted in engineering. I mean, the the emphasis has been on price and reliability, not change, resist change. And it sounds like now change from their point of view, this is rapid. I mean, and this is really, you know, radical radical change.

Markham: 06:40

And what are they from your point because you're coming from a different culture, you have different power system over in Israel, and then you've worked in other in other countries. How do the Americans and, by extension, Canadians, how do they compare?

Aaron: 06:55

You know, if I would compare, for example, the US to the European market, I think that there are I I would say there is a difference. For example, I do believe that adopting grid enhancing technologies and and, I mean, dynamic line rating, and probably we'll speak a little bit more about what it is. Probably Europe was first to adopt, and you see large scale pilot and initial deployment earlier in Europe. But I think that what happening in the US interesting is that there is regulation, which is not as as, you know, clear cut in Europe. In in in the US, you have FERC order 881, and it's giving the first step, the first phase for a transition from what was in the past, static line rating into dynamic.

Aaron: 07:45

It's not the end game, but this is the first and very important step to shift the industry. And we're not speaking about regulation that will take part in a decade, but in the end of 2025. So it it's just in less than 2 years, which is in in this world, it's around the corner.

Markham: 08:03

Yeah. Exactly. And and I have to say, I used to think that Canada's stodgy old, electricity system because we we have a very different system. You know, we have 10 provinces, and each province basically has a monopoly on what goes on inside their borders. I think in 8 or or 7 or 8 of of the 10, the the utility is owned by the government, you know, so it's a crown corporation.

Markham: 08:28

And it's just so much more chaotic and and, down in the US, so many more, jurisdictions that have to be taken into account. But there's also layers of regulation and planning that don't exist in Canada. Like, in Canada, you know, the government will set some policy, and then the utility owns the, generation, transmission, and distribution. It's all integrated into a a vertical well, it's vertically integrated. But in the US, it it can be.

Markham: 08:58

It can't be. I mean, and there's all kinds of, of different wrinkles to that. You've got ERCOT in Texas, which is just isolated from the rest of the rest of the country. I mean, it's it's kinda crazy in a way. And and then you've got FERC at the top, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and then you've got regional transmission organizations, and then you've got some planning organizations like you have in the West Coast in between that, and then you've got state regulators.

Markham: 09:24

That must be just a a bit of a a thicket and bit of a nightmare to to navigate.

Aaron: 09:30

Yes. Absolutely. But I think that what we're seeing is that there is there is a path that regulator is is stating in the US, and he's saying, we are moving from static line rating into dynamic line rating. What it mean in in a single sentence is the fact that your maximum capacity of the grid will be environmental condition. And in every given moment, you will have the capability to optimize the capacity.

Aaron: 10:01

And and this is a huge shift in mentality because, you know, it's not static. I need to plan. Things are changing. So so, yes, many transmission operator, each one has its own new ones. And and and will it happen on time, or will it be an extension?

Aaron: 10:19

What Canada will do? Will it follow? But but you have the train, I think, left the station, and and, you know, utilities understand that what happened, it's it need to be changed, and and we're seeing it. We're seeing utilities start to you know, starting the process of a dock, completely new new process that would enable them to optimize the capacity from the existing grid.

Markham: 10:43

Well, interesting. So you've talked about dynamic line, monitoring a couple of times. So maybe it's time for to to define that, and if you could, please.

Aaron: 10:53

Yeah. I would try to do it as as simple as possible. But, you know, people are asking, what's the limiting factor of the grid? What what do we need to enhance the capacity? And it's interesting.

Aaron: 11:04

The limiting factor of the grid is the temperature of the conductors, of the cables. So someone did the calculation and calculate for the worst case scenario and said, okay. In this line, we cannot exceed 1,000 amps because that would be the maximum temperature. But what's import interesting is that parameters like wind are cooling the conductors. So if we would measure the wind, if there is a breeze right now, I can drive much more impassive.

Aaron: 11:34

In in some cases, 50% more capacity just by having a cool breeze. So suddenly, measuring all those temperature and wind and doing the calculation around it will give me and this is why it's called dynamic. What would be the maximum capacity in every given moment? And when you do the calculation over time, you can see that you can enhance the capacity by 30, 40% just using data. And those are big numbers, and you don't need to change to grid just to collect the data.

Markham: 12:06

That's an inter that's an interesting challenge, collecting the data. You know, big data and analytics has been around for a long time. This this is not new. And I I would imagine that the utility sector, in the US and and in Canada for that matter, at least have some data collection and and data crunching capability. Do you find that it varies, quite a bit amongst, you know, across the US?

Aaron: 12:33

I would say that utility have a lot of data about, I would say, their electrical parameters. But if you're looking at external parameters about risk resiliency, about, you know, wind and temperature, you don't have. So it's it's like, you know, adopting new concept, new solution. And and now it became a problem because we're saying that collecting the data and doing the analysis, it's not a big problem because you have the sensors. You have it's not a problem of monitoring.

Aaron: 13:07

It's rather a problem of scalability. Because, eventually, the idea is not how to do a successful pilot over 1 tower. It's how can I deploy it over 10,000 miles? And and that's, I would say, what drove us in order to develop our, I would say, different solution to this approach.

Markham: 13:32

Can you tell us about your experience in Israel? Because I understand that you have worked on about, 50% of the transmission groups. You've got quite a bit of experience there. Maybe tell us about that.

Aaron: 13:45

Yeah. So our our first, customer to work with with was the Israeli Electric Corporation. The second was one was, by the way, the New York Power Authority. But in Israel, we started Israel is it's it's not a huge country, but it's one single operator that, by the way, doing distribution and transmission, all over. We started with a pilot, and it was a successful pilot.

Aaron: 14:13

And then we did a scale up. We did a scale up to roughly 25% of the national grid, more than 1,000 kilometers. And for us, it was not only important, you know, to scale up, but to show that our concept is is scalable. It's different because and and maybe I explain I will explain a few words. What's different between what we are doing to the conventional approach to data collection or doing monitoring.

Aaron: 14:43

Sure. Because what what happened up until now is that if you would like to measure, for example, wind for capacity measurement or electrical transient event for resiliency or wildfire, you have sensors, and you can do fantastic pilots over small locations. And the question was how to scale up. And we said when we started, it was, like, more than 4 5 years ago, that in order to scale up, in order to build a scalable solution, if you need to go out and start to deploy sensors on towers, that will not be scalable. It will be hard.

Aaron: 15:17

It will be cumbersome to start to deploy over, you know, thousands of towers in rural station, putting solar panels, communication links, and and we we develop a solution that don't require to deploy anything. And and, you know, you can ask how you can sense without sensors. And what we are saying is that the sensors are already there. The utility deploy the sensors. The utility don't call them sensor.

Aaron: 15:45

They call them the fiber optics networks, because in most of the utility today, you have as part of the grounding line, you have fiber optics cables in the transmission line. And we can use those standard telecom fibers as sensors. So for from our perspective, it's like someone deploy sensors along thousands of kilometers, and we just need to come and light it up and start to use it. And and and that's the main difference between what we are doing and any kind of other sensor based technology.

Markham: 16:21

Okay. This is fascinating, because that's probably the most, cogent explanation of a grid enhancing techno a grid enhancing technology that I've heard, and I've done a few of these interviews. Okay. So to summarize for my listeners, because they're like me, I I'm a journalist not an engineer. I I, you know, don't know exactly how these things work.

Markham: 16:41

So I'm gonna summarize it as best I can, and you tell me if I've got it right. So, basically, the, the power the transmission system is being operated at x capacity, but in fact, it could be operated at x plus, maybe 25%, maybe 50%, if it was optimized. And it's not been optimized because, you know, who really needed it before? But there hasn't been a lot of growth in, generation and, but peak load, I think, all over North America has basically been flat since 2009 after the great recession. So who you know, nobody really paid that much attention to it.

Markham: 17:17

Now we're we're we're predicting, like, maybe 2, 3% growth a year. That's that's big in the industry. So you gotta get to move the electrons around. Now people are paying attention to it, and they want to maximize or optimize those transmission lines, and lo and behold, you have the technology and they had put on, they had strung fiber optic, cable, along with their transmission lines that could do exactly what needs to be done, no extra cost invite, and they just didn't never thought of using it that way. And now you can collect data that they had maybe hadn't collected or hadn't crunched in a particular way, and now you that would enable the utility or the, the transmission company to increase the amount of power the transmission system can carry, and that's that's the innovation here.

Markham: 18:09

Have I have I got that more or less right?

Aaron: 18:12

Absolutely. Yeah. Utilities deploy those fiber optics from good for good reasons for, you know, communication purposes, but we're saying we can use them for sensing purposes. We can use the same asset that you have in order to monitor, for example, measure the wind precisely in every tower and tower and do a dynamic line rate rating calculation and tell you in real time what's the optimized capacity in every given moment. What's the alternative?

Aaron: 18:40

The alternative is to go and deploy thousands and thousands of sensors, which is it's doable, but it's not really feasible. But you don't need because you have the fibers.

Markham: 18:51

Now in Canada, which is probably the systems that I'm I'm most familiar with, we generally think of our grid, I wouldn't say it's moderate. It's not a smart grid. We don't have a not all provinces have smart meters and and the the number crunching capability you're talking about. But I think we would say that it's been a fairly, this the grids are fairly stable. We don't have a lot of big outages like they have had in the states and and a lot of crises.

Markham: 19:22

So I understand, though, that you are in conversation with, a utility a Canadian utility to deploy or at least test, your technology on their grid. Is that correct?

Aaron: 19:36

Yes. And and I mentioned that we're dealing with, capacity and resiliency. And I think that every location and every utility, in in some cases, have different challenges. And and and you can guess that resiliency challenge in in in Canada would be different than, for example, let's say, California. And, you know, the harsh, winter, icing issues, icing plus extreme wind that can generate galloping to the, to the transmission line, that's that's a huge, challenge.

Aaron: 20:09

And I agree with you about the quality of the grid. We're speaking about, you know, tier 1 utility with a high quality grid, but in in a very, challenging conditions. And what we can bring into this equation is the ability to to detect problems, external problems. For example, icing or formation of icing on the grid, that's a issue. Because if you will have right now an icing plus wind, you're getting galloping.

Aaron: 20:37

The wire start to to, to shift, and this that's that's a big risk that the utility would like to know about it. Once again, can be done without any to deploy it and so because they have the fibers. So it's a different use case, but it's it's quite critical for this kind of utility.

Markham: 20:56

Sure. I mean, we saw in on the prairies, only a couple of weeks ago, maybe 3 weeks ago. Fortunately, just before I went to Alberta for a for a week. But they, you know, they had, temperatures of minus 57 c, which, you know, and there and there was real concern. There was just about an outage, rolling brownouts or blackouts, in Alberta.

Markham: 21:19

They came very close. Only an emergency alert saved them, from from doing that and, you know, basically a crude form of demand response. So but now, you know, it's I think it's generally recognized in in Canada that the, you know, demand is going to be increasing, 2% a year, or or thereabouts, and we need to start paying attention to to the grid. Is it possible that we might be able to optimize what we have and keep the construction of new grid transmission down to a minimum?

Aaron: 21:59

I think so. I think that what what had been proven over several researchers and and and and that you can in almost all condition, you can enhance the capacity by 20, 30 up to 40% in in some specific timing up to 50%. All of it can be done with the existing grid. No need to do any reconstruction, and this is an optimization. In in probably, you know, there is a long term road that you will need more, but technology can bring you this benefit in in a very short cycle.

Aaron: 22:37

Yeah.

Markham: 22:37

It's you know, I've been using the the, the figures 2 times, or 3 times as much, electricity, by 2050. But there's also the counterargument that the electrical appliances and, you know, things like, we have a heat pump in our house, and I'm shocked by how efficient it is and how low our electricity bills are. I mean, it's just it's been a revelation and a real eye opener for me. And and if you apply that observation to other electrical work, you know, like electric vehicles and and so on. So the argument goes that we, in fact, because of the increased efficiency of of electrical, equipment, that we won't need that much.

Markham: 23:22

And you can almost foresee that maybe if we do this right, we might be able to optimize our existing grid to the point where in most cases, given the increased energy efficiency, that we don't need to build more transmission. And because we've watched what the Americans are doing, and, of course, in Quebec, they've they've tried to build a hydro line down into through northeast, in in down into New England, and it had all kinds of NIMBY problems, people opposing the transmission line. So everybody recognizes you don't wanna build anything unless you absolutely have to because it takes a long time to get approved and then a long time to build it, And I imagine that's coming up in conversations with North American utilities.

Aaron: 24:08

Yes. Yes. And and I would say another important aspect is, in many cases, when you speak about extracting more, it's based it it it's it's a trade off of safety and reliability. In this case, it's not a trade off. You can enhance both of them.

Aaron: 24:25

Because when you are using the data, when you are doing a real time calculation, you can ensure that in any given moment, you are not passing your, you know, your safety threshold. And, surprisingly, you can extract more and be safer in in in the same aspect because before, you just took, you know, safety margin without the data, without without knowing where you are. So it's it's it's a dual benefit, and this is important because we're going into a stage that we're trying to leverage the the the the margins that we have. We're putting the grid in more stress, and the grid is is old. It's it's 50 years old in in in average.

Aaron: 25:06

So an aging system under stress, you can you can forecast a a reliability issue. Therefore, it's not only data for enhancing capacity, but also to improve your reliability, which is also a very important aspect.

Markham: 25:22

One of the the parts of this story, and I think the energy transition in general that is of great interest to me, and we don't talk about it much, and that is the role of enabling technologies. You know, the what you're doing, where would it be without software? Where would it be without, more powerful computers to do the data crunching? Where would it be without artificial intelligence? And so what role do those kinds of enabling technologies play in what you're doing?

Aaron: 25:55

Yeah. It it's it's a major part because, you know, think about the device that we we build. We build the device that enable us to transform the fibers into, sensors. But now we need to collect data in order to know to understand how a partial discharges look like, how a wildfire, how an icing. So we start to collect huge amount of data, and and, you know, finally, over the the years that we collected data, when we passed the 2 petabyte of data, something like a year ago, we said, right now, we have more data than the whole British library, by itself.

Aaron: 26:35

This is really big data. The system generate terabytes of data every day. And and and and AI, it's it's a major part. Nobody can really build a, you know, classic algorithm that can crunch such a huge amount of data. So I think that this revolution is is a necessity in order to, you know, present solution like the the solution that we're doing, really dealing with huge amount of data over thousands of miles.

Markham: 27:04

Maybe we'll wrap up the interview this way, Eran, and that, looking out 5 years, 10 years, maybe even 20 15 or 20 years, what kind of, other innovations, are gonna come along that make your job easier, that make the grid more productive, and predictable and reliable, and so on? I mean, can you can you look into your crystal ball and give us a a peek into the future?

Aaron: 27:32

Yeah. I think that one of the tasks that we have in front of us, we said, we have an infrastructure, and now it's for enhancing the capacity. But we are collecting data about, you know, any kind of external environment, and and we would like really to, you know, improve resiliency to, you know, new use use cases, wildfire, extreme wind, Predictive and preventive maintenance, we didn't speak about it, but utilities spend huge amount of money because they're doing routine maintenance procedure without data. So bringing data into the predict the predictive and and preventive maintenance of utility. Really, I think that we can change those the way that utilities are doing their processes up until now just by bringing them, you know, a useful and and very relevant data.

Aaron: 28:23

So, hopefully, that that would go, you know, step by step, starting with capacity, resiliency, predictive, preventive. There is a lot of things to do in the in the coming years.

Markham: 28:33

Well, good luck in doing them, and good luck in your expansion into North America. And, we will be watching your little company with, with great interest. So thank you very much for this.

Aaron: 28:44

Thank you very much, Florian. Thank you very much.