2023-Japan-VEIR

STEPHEN CONANT: Thank you very much, Steve, and konnichiwa. My name is Stephen Conant. I'm the Vice President of Commercial for VEIR. And I want to thank the MIT Industrial Leadership Program, John Roberts, and everyone for inviting us here to speak. We're really excited to talk about what is the next generation of superconductivity.

Our Chief Technology Officer, Tim Heidel, is an MIT PhD in electrical engineering. He actually led the MIT Grid of the Future study in 2010 and 2012. Since then, a lot has happened. So I am here, really, to talk about the grid of the future, in particular, superconductors. If you think that you know what superconductors are, you do. But we're actually using them and cooling them in a way that makes them much more applicable to the challenges that we face on the electric grid.

So transmission is in the middle of climate change. If we're going to increase the amount of carbon-low fuels that we have, we need to be able to move it in places that it hasn't been moved before. But nobody wants to look at really transmission lines. So the difficulty in siting new transmission at the time when we need to double or triple the amount that we have in the world is a huge challenge.

We need to get ourselves off of fossil fuels, replace them with renewables. But those renewable resources aren't close to where the demand for those resources are. So we have to get it there. And transmission is the way to do it.

At the same time, we're electrifying everything. Demand is going up, and it's shifting where that demand is located. And it puts a greater burden on the grid and what the expectations on our electric grid is about.

So superconductors have been around-- superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by a Dutch physicist, Onnes. Received the Nobel Prize. And he used it-- it was really sort of nonsignificant. It didn't have a commercial application. Was at the temperature of liquid helium, 4 Kelvin.

Fast forward to 1986, and it was discovered in ceramic materials, which is at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Therefore, the applicability and potential for commercialization was there. However, it really hasn't achieved that.

This is a early application in 2012. This is actually in Yokohama. There was a lot of work done in 2008 through 2012 on superconductivity as it applies to the electric grid.

Just to go back, superconductors, our company is effectively the-- is what it's about. So it's Ohm's law. Voltage equals ampacity times resistance. If you take away the resistance, VEIR, if you take away the resistance, you can use a lot of amps at really any voltage.

The challenge with the early applications was that you needed to keep that superconducting material, that ceramic material, at a critical temperature of 77 Kelvin, 200 degrees centigrade below zero. Doing that the way it was applied was through a closed-loop refrigeration system. And that closed refrigeration system made it difficult for you to go long distances.

So right now, the longest application of a superconductor is 2,500 meters. That's in Russia. And you also have a lot of mechanical moving parts, compresses, et cetera. So while it was a great promise, and these work on the grid, the real ability to go long distance wasn't there. And you needed to continually cool that system.

VEIR changes that by using a distributed cooling system. We evaporate a portion of that liquid nitrogen. And that change of state from a liquid to a gas has 20 times the cooling power of a closed-loop refrigeration system. So here is a evaporative cooler, which is distributed across the length of the line. So that enables us to go long distances and also enables us to go overhead.

So instead of a line that looks like this, we can replace it with a line that looks like this. It's got the same amount of capacity. It's a lower voltage, much higher efficiency. So in terms of siting, it's a lot easier. And we can get a lot of power in a smaller space, which is really what it's about.

So who's interested in this type of stuff? Utilities-- US and global-- who need higher capacity in existing rights of way. You're not getting more rights of way. It's just the density of population. It's difficult to get. There's a lot of opposition to siting new transmission. Data centers who want to move a lot of capacity to where they're located with low impact on the grid, integration of offshore wind, fleet vehicles, and solar farm developers are all interested.

Here in Japan, Japan has a history of superconductivity. There are companies here that make the tapes. One of the key things for us is to drive down the tape cost. We're going to be using a lot more tape, and that will drive down the overall cost of the system. So provides more flexibility. There are supply chain opportunities that exist out there as this industry grows.

So with that, I'll say, if you think of VEIR, think of more power, with less tower. Thank you very much.

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