30 - Measuring inertia to support the grid with Chris Kimmett (COO @ Reactive Technologies)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All right then. So what's Reactive Technologies, Chris?

Reactive Technologies. So the thing that we're famous for, particularly in the UK, is measuring inertia. As we've seen, the UK grid transition from coal and gas-fired generation, which have these big spinning turbines, they're very, very heavy.

As we put more wind and solar, we have a decreasing inertia on the grid. We all say the control room back in the day it was a bit like driving a steam train.

You've got this very, very heavy machine that's burning a whole load of coal, but it's very stable. It kind of rides through faults.

As it gets lighter and lighter, it's a little bit like riding a motorbike all of a sudden. So this is why we need faster frequency response. Different frequency response markets, different design of market to catch that motorbike as it's falling.

And yeah, our technology helps to measure inertia. So we can tell a grid. Do you have a heavy grid today, or do you have a light grid today? How much frequency response do you need to buy? So we're a mixture of hardware and software platform offering.

Cool. And so Reactive Technologies has been in the news a bit, various--

well, mostly good news really. You've raised a lot of money. You've signed some big deals. And you guys sell--

you do a lot of analysis and sell information, I think, to grids like National Grid. Is that right?

Yes. Our core business is selling data to grids exactly like this.

National Grid ESO is our kind of lighthouse and first commercial customer in the UK. We have a six-year agreement with them to give data to their control room. So it's a "data as a service" kind of offering. And we're now--

DaaS.

CHRIS KIMMETT: DaaS. Sure. Everything's like a service now.

I love it. Love it.

Yeah, and we're now on that kind of internationalization journey. So we've done pilots outside the UK in Japan, in Germany, in New Zealand, in a couple of others. So there's only one National Grid in the UK. So if we want to find another National Grid, we have to go elsewhere.

And then coming later, towards the end of this month, we have an offering for energy traders and for battery aggregators to take that same data source, to take that same understanding of grid constraints that we give to grids, and to be able to give that to the wider market, all so they can understand and inform their bidding strategies.

Cool. And so Reactive Technologies, how long has the company been going for? You've been around for a while in the company, right?

Yeah, so I've been at Reactive for five and a half years.

I joined to run the grid business unit. So ffive and a half years ago, we'd done two innovation projects with National Grid. The first one was sending signals through the power system.

So we put a big load bank, great big toaster right in the middle of the grid, and we sent a signal out across that whole grid. And we could measure it in any plug socket.

So you're, like, modulating across the [INAUDIBLE].. Is is--

like, is it--

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah.

How does that work?

So the way I was trying to explain it is, think back to the August 2019 blackout.

Yeah, where people were stuck on tubes in London in the dark.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Don't think about that bit, right? But actually think about the physics of the event. So we had a--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, who gets blamed?

CHRIS KIMMETT: We had a 1 and 1/2 gigawatt power swing.

Yeah.

CHRIS KIMMETT: If the frequency fell really slowly, that means you've got a really high inertia grid. But the frequency fell really quickly. And that shows us we have a low inertia grid. So we do the same thing, but like, miniaturized.

We inject 5 megawatts of energy into the grid, instead of 1,500.

And we take the same measurement. So we're sending this pulse of energy, this 5 megawatts into the grid. If the grid is really resistant to that signal, and the amplitude is very low by the time we measure it, that means there's a really high inertia grid.

Whereas if the signal flies through the grid and it's really easy to measure, we've got a really low inertia grid.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Ah, I've got so many questions about this. So you guys inject power into the grid, just a little bit with, a certain waveform, and then you measure it around in other places. And then you figure out how heavy or light the grid is in inertia terms, right?

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: How do you--

[INAUDIBLE]

there's a time-sinking problem here over distances. How do you do that?

GPS. So GPS gives you a very, very, very accurate timestamp. So we have one location where we're sending this pulse out into the grid. For the pilots, we use load banks, effectively a massive toaster turning on and off. Very low CapEx, but you wouldn't want to run that for a long time because you just make loads of heat.

By the way, so people haven't seen these things, they look a bit like peaking plant. Like, they're in containers or whatever. And it is literally just a sink of power. You're just using up power to heat the air, usually.

It's exactly like a toaster. It's a resistive element. It's a wire that gets hot and a chimney to make the heat go away.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: But no bread.

So--

but no bread, just hot air.

So great for a pilot, and it proved the concept. But for the commercial service, we're using an ultra capacitor. So it's a form of energy storage that's massively resistant to degradation. We are sending a pulse of energy every 2 seconds, roughly, into the grid.

So we're going to full import, then full export, then full import, then full export every 2 seconds. And if you go to any battery investor and say, hey, I'm going to do that with your battery, they'll tell you to go away because you'll have a small pile of ash by the end of the year, whereas an ultra cap's super resistant to degradation.

So we built a bespoke asset to provide this service to National Grid.

It will be there for the long term. So we have a six-year contract delivering this data from this asset. And yes, that's the model.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: This is so cool. So what is an ultra capacitor? Like, the words ultra capacitor get me very excited. But what does one look like?

Well, it looks like a shipping container that says Reactive Technologies on the outside, but if you look on the inside, if you look at the type of technology, so lithium ion batteries are storing energy in chemical form. An ultra capacitor is effectively storing energy like static electricity.

It's got two plates, and you're storing static electricity on those plates. It's like when you rub a balloon on your hair. You've got that static charge held on the outside of the balloon. This is very, very similar.

Two, plates, you don't get that electrochemical wear when you have this sort of chemical change over time. Instead, you've just got plates, and you've got power shifting between those, allowing us to give a hard and quick zap into the power system. And it's actually the biggest, continuously operating ultra capacitor anywhere in the world. Love it, but probably not in the universe. There's probably some aliens with ultra capacitors somewhere. Just the words ultra capacitor just makes me think about, yeah, interstellar stuff.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah, it's a bit something a Bond villain would have.

Yeah, it is, it is. And so who's in the company? Who are the bond villains?

How many people are there? And like, well, yeah, tell us about that, tell us about the company.

We've got 54 people, roughly split 50/50 between the UK and Finland. So everybody in the UK is from an electricity background. So before I was at Reactive, I was at Open Energy doing demand side response. And before that, I come from the world of consultancy and sustainability consultancy.

So everyone in the UK is from--

Probably worth a mention. You used to work with Robyn who's--

I did.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Modo Robyn now, but used to be Open Energy Robyn.

Yeah, that's right. Yes, we used to work very closely at Open Energy. So--

well, maybe we could talk about demand-side response as well later.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, yeah.

How this is going. So 54 people. Everyone in the UK broadly from an energy background. Some power system engineer, some real deep electricity expertise.

Other half of the company in Finland is from a communications background. We have real capability in digital signal processing. We've got lots of ex-Nokia engineers.

I was going to ask you about whether there's a few Nokia folks kicking around.

So we're based in a town called Oulu. It's about 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. So it's really far north in Finland, which is where Nokia used to have their R&D center. And they're deeply, deeply technical folks. It's very dark in winter, so they spend lots of time inside, creating software and very high quality engineering.

I always say in power systems, we sort of obsess over megawatts and hertz. And that's like our comfortable domain.

A telecommunications engineer obsesses over milliwatts and megahertz. It's the same physics, but it's a very different order of magnitude.

And Fourier transform forms and the [INAUDIBLE]..

CHRIS KIMMETT: All of this stuff, they obsess by. And there's plenty of problems that were sold in the telecommunications realm many years ago that we're just encountering in power systems now. So if you look at a very light power system, be it Scotland or Australia, you start to see oscillations.

Tell them, when you say a light, remind us what you mean by a light.

Low inertia.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Low inertia.

So full of wind and solar makes it very light. You don't have these heavy spinning machines that are creating that stability that we used to see for free but with a whole load [INAUDIBLE]..

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Well, let's do it.

I'm putting you on the spot here, Chris.

What is inertia?

What is inertia? So if you have the physics version of it, it's measured in joules. It's energy. And it's the spinning mass in a power system.

You can think of it in a very similar way to if you're riding a bicycle. If you're riding a very big, heavy bicycle, or I used the analogy of a steam train before, if it's very heavy, it has lots of inertia. So if you're going down a hill and then all of a sudden you're going up a hill, the very heavy bicycle is going to carry you quite a long way.

It's going to kind of ride through problems. And we see that in the power system with frequency response. If I've got a frequency event, if I lose 500 megawatts or so, high inertia system--

the frequency falls very gently and very slowly.

A low inertia system, that's more like your lightweight carbon racing bike, or it's moving from that steam train to that motorbike. It's a lot harder to balance. It can be a lot more agile if you control it in the right way. But you do have to control it in the right way.

So inertia is literally how heavy a grid is. It's how much spinning mass there is on the grid. And that amount of spinning mass gives it stability or not.

And I guess the problem that we're trying to solve here is that spinning mass is generally turbines, right? It's steam turbines or gas turbines.

Or--

yeah, that kind of thing. And that was very useful for the last 100 years on the grid because it kept grid frequency and high inertia, very heavy system.

But we're replacing those technologies with wind and solar that are connected behind inverters, right, or passes through the conversion, power conversion units, which are electronics. There's nothing big spinning. It's [INAUDIBLE]

and things happening, which is a different world.

And so we--

although we've got the same megawatts, we need to replace the other bit, which is the inertia. And I guess the first thing to do that is to measure it, where you guys come in. So before you guys, how was National Grid keeping an eye on inertia, or--

So every grid globally basically has a model of what they think the inertia might be. So each of the big transmission-connected generators are connected into their SCADA system. They can see them in the control room.

And they'll make some assumptions about, this has a steam turbine that is of this size, and so I think it contains this amount of stored energy. In practice, those generators can shift modes and bring different bits of kit in and out. So their inertia changes a bit, but that's kind of OK.

There's also a load of inertia on the distribution grid. So we have CHP engines. We have--

in every single water utility, there's a whole load of pumps moving water around--

That's the thing.

--which also provides inertia.

Motors are inertia as well, right? If it's spinning, whether it's generating or consuming.

Conveyor belts, fans, all this kind of stuff. And in the UK, about 30% of total inertia today is on the distribution grid. If we decommission all of the coal and gas plant, that 30% is going to turn into 50%, 60%, or 100%.

That's kind of embedded in the distribution grid. We actually did some work in New Zealand.

And they said, well, we don't have any heavy industry. We don't have these big spinning motors, so we think there's very, very little inertia in the distribution network.

The study that we did, it turns out they have about 18% of their total inertia in the distribution grid.

Wow.

So even when they think there's nothing there--

we just have sheep and tourism, we don't have heavy industry--

they still have big hydro plant. They still have water utilities. They still have, I don't know, pool pumps that people have at home.

And you've got this long tail of inertia. And the only way to really measure it is this kind of injecting of power in the grid. So we're in the strange position where our competition today is our customer,

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, yeah.

Our customer has a model. They're familiar with the model. They kind of know the model. And we're coming along and saying, we know the grid better than you.

So what about the locational stuff? Can you see, is there a way to figure out where the inertia is, or is it--

you're just looking across the whole grid, here's my inertia number.

I know it's more complicated than this. But across the whole grid, this is how much inertia we have. Can you pinpoint where it is? There's some in London, there's some in Scotland, that kind of stuff.

Yes, you can measure. We call it regional inertia.

So you can kind of parcel the grid up into different sections and look at regional inertia. Today, National Grid aren't doing so much optimization on a regional basis.

They're kind of treating the grid globally. The EU is doing a little bit of optimization on a regional basis. Australia is doing quite a lot. They are saying, each state has to carry a minimum amount of inertia because it's a long, thin grid, and there's sort of a risk of islanding.

So we can measure it regionally. We put measurement units in the right place on the power system to be able to parcel it up in that way. So you can send one signal, but then it propagates in different ways through these different regions to take those--

to take those measurements.

So are you guys seeing--

are you seeing--

how to answer ask this question in the right way. So National Grid has changed how it's bought frequency response over time. And we've had a lot more batteries provide frequency response.

So I remember back in, when we were probably both working at aggregators back in sort of 2016, 2017, there was those static--

non-dynamic frequency response of static. There was a lot of--

CHRIS KIMMETT: EFR was just coming in.

EFR was just coming in. We had a lot of pumped hydro providing secondary FFR.

And now you basically got [? subsecond ?]

batteries providing all of it. So have you noticed a difference over time of inertia changing because of frequency response and all these batteries on the grid?

So if you look at, let's call it frequency performance, there's kind of different time domains. So inertia is really the first 200 milliseconds of an event. So even the fastest battery isn't doing anything within that first 200 milliseconds. It's probably taking that amount of time to measure what's happening before it can then take half a second or a second to respond. So inertia itself hasn't changed, but we have seen frequency performance change quite early.

There will be some battery [INAUDIBLE]

that complain in this fight because in DS3 in Ireland, you have to be full response in 150 milliseconds. And there's some fluent systems and other systems out there that are doing it. So there are some batteries that can do it, but they're just not being utilized in that way in the UK.

That's very true, and they do get close. But when we're taking the measurements, you can still tell the difference between inertia and frequency response. If you change how our signal looks, you can excite the frequency response instead of exciting the inertia.

So you can actually kind of measure those two different things independently. Because frequency response is relatively easy to measure and monitor, we don't do that today. We focus on that inertia bit that no one's managed to measure before.

But to answer your question, yes, you can see that frequency performance change. When we looked at Italy, one thing that they've done is they've got really, really fast-acting response from an HVDC line. And you could see it very, very clearly when the HVDC line went down and the frequency performance just started falling appallingly in comparison.

High-voltage, long-distance transmission lines that are high voltage, dynamic containment, Luminec. I used to be an electrical engineer. High-voltage direct current lines.

Right. So they've got one between Sardinia and the mainland that helps with frequency performance, particularly on the island.

That's not a bad trip, is it? I'd go and check that out and put some Reactive Technologies out there and spend the week having pizza and pasta. Not bad. Not bad. So what about internationally?

Which global grids have got lots of inertia and which need more of it? And where are the problems, or is it across the board, everybody's got a problem, and you've got to solve it all? This is a good business.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Obviously.

Very good business.

CHRIS KIMMETT: And the world, I'd say, has changed in the last five years. I'd say the picture from when I joined Reactive Technologies, the mantra was high renewable islands.

The UK is an islanded system. We have DC links to our other countries, whereas the EU is a massive, massive copper plate. So it's got a far greater sort of shared inertia over that system.

So when I joined five years ago, the mantra was very much high renewable islands. So that would be, you know, UK, including Ireland. That would be Australia, for example. It would be ERCOT. We talked about ERCOT a little bit earlier.

Although they're part of the US contiguous continent electrically, they're completely islanded.

And actually, when I went to the US and didn't know that Texas was island. So why are they an electric island? And the guy just said, because Texas.

Don't mess with Texas.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Sure.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Do you actually know what why it is? I found this out. So--

I think it's they wanted to avoid the federal regulation.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, there's a few reasons. There's, like, some regulatory reasons. Also, in Texas--

we're definitely going off topic here, but here we go--

it started as production of ice.

So ice factories got together and started a--

I can't remember what it used to be called. But essentially, they started a group of these manufacturers and started sharing electricity connections between them. Before you knew it, you had a grid of ice manufacturers.

And it grew out of that. And then since then, they decided they wanted to just be their own thing.

CHRIS KIMMETT: I didn't realize that was kind of the nucleus. There's another similar one, which is Japan. Japan has a 50 hertz grid and a 60 hertz grid.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Why is that? Well, in Tokyo, they were buying one set of equipment, and in Osaka, they were buying another set of equipment. In Tokyo, they were buying the British equipment. In Osaka, they were buying the US equipment.

And these cities were so far apart by horseback, presumably, they thought, these grids will never touch. So it's fine that we're kind of building separate grids because they were building it for the city without, you know, this vision that these cities would eventually grow and become one huge megalopolis.

So you have a 50 hertz grid in the North. You have a 60 hertz grid in the South. And you have, I think it's six different DC back-to-back connections to kind of join the grids. And you have, yeah, one massive city that's Tokyo-Osaka.

They also have that with metros, though, right? You go to--

yeah, if you go to Tokyo, you can--

there's a competing metro system.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yes.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Metro systems, which, again, I love.

Well, we have that a little bit in the UK. There's multiple different Birmingham train stations in London. We have a whole load of train stations when private operators built in Tokyo, they've really taken it to an extreme.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: I love it.

They got massive train stations right next to each other.

Even with the same name, in some cases, which is brilliant. So anyway, we digress. So grids around the world, generally islands. And they've all got a few problems.

So five years ago, it was definitely all about high renewable islands, whereas the picture has just changed quite radically in the last five years. We have discussions now with European grids where they're looking at everybody decarbonizing very, very rapidly at the same time.

So this huge amount of inertia and this huge copper plate that they've kind of taken for granted for so many years will decline much, much quicker. We say in the UK, we've had a fast renewables transition.

But in reality, it's been 10 years.

We've had some time to get used to it. If we look at the next wave of renewables rollout, if we look at the speed of implementation of wind and solar, it's going to be very, very quick. And I think it's going to be very hard for a lot of grids to keep up and to not be the bottleneck.

That's the thing, though.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Exactly. It's going to become--

CHRIS KIMMETT: It's going to become very, very politically unacceptable for them to say, no, you cannot connect. Or yes, you can connect, but I'll constrain you for half of the time. This is not something they'll be allowed to do. So they're really having to kind of push and look at the next generation of technology.

It's mad. Humankind always gets tripped up by steep adoption, S-curves of technology. And they get steeper--

it feels steep now, right? Oh, we're building some offshore wind, right? It's going to get faster.

And these grid issues are going to get faster. Same with the energy crisis right now and decades of underinvestment. We'll not go down that route.

But yeah, a very--

always catches folks out. And no one's immune--

none of us are immune to it, you know? I'm surprised about it every day.

So come back to your product, or products. Reactive Technologies has a few different products. Do you want to just talk us through what they do? So the first one is measuring inertia.

I think we've--

have we done that one?

Does it have a cool name? That's the most important thing. The overall product for grids is called grid metrics.

Grid metrics. Inertia measurement does what it says on the tin.

Metrics are the next on the end, I hope.

CHRIS KIMMETT: That's correct.

Excellent, excellent.

So the main service and kind of the core of our business is offering these inertia measurement services to grid operators, transmission grid operators most of the time. We also have services for distribution grids and we have a growing kind of portfolio of those globally.

That's measuring system strength. So if you think of inertia as the stiffness of the frequency, it's kind of how my frequency is stable or not. System strength is the stiffness of voltage. And distribution networks don't really care about frequency today.

But they care about--

Really do, really, really care about--

CHRIS KIMMETT: --voltage and keeping that within bounds. And it's a similar relationship with renewables. We have a declining system strength with more and more renewables on the grid, the spinning masses [INAUDIBLE].

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: You guys actually invent a whole new language to describe this stuff to non-engineers, right? About strong, weak, heavy, light. Kudos, kudos.

Yes. And then last but not least, we have this upcoming service launched at the end of this month for energy traders, for aggregators, potentially for asset owners to also get the same grid insight. So to understand the amount of inertia on the grid, which should inform the volumes of dynamic containment that will be bought.

The other thing that we offer is event detection. So we've got these very, very, very accurate, time-stamped measurement units, which are taking 48,000 samples of data every second, which is a lot of data.

That is a challenge, yeah.

CHRIS KIMMETT: But we're able to detect power stations tripping. And we're able to do that before market remit notices. So potentially traders can get a real insight, and they can start trading ahead of remit notices coming out.

And because we're doing that by measuring frequency, by measuring public data. It's an absolutely kind of acceptable way to inform your trading strategy and to try and get an edge.

You know why I love this company? Your company. And I love this conversation. It's because it's almost like a reductionist approach to--

if we get philosophical about it--

the reductionism approach to electrical systems. And really, a settlement period is a cycle, right?

If you go down low enough, I know there's a lot of challenges about that, maybe a couple of cycles. At the moment, it's 30 minutes, or it could be five minutes. Or it could be a minute in the future, a half minute. When you get far enough down on the 50 hertz cycle, you're not going lower than number 50 times a second. And I really like the fact that we're, as an industry, we're starting to look at this sub-second stuff in detail.

And for us, it came from those Finnish engineers it came from that telecommunications mindset.

You know, I remember when the EFR requirements came out. And there was second-by-second metering. And everyone said, ah, second by second.

That's loads of data. It's really, really fast and responding within a second. It's incredibly quick. And if you speak to a telecommunication engineer that built video conferencing software, they would tell you a second is a very long time. It's a very long time for someone to wait and have that kind of satellite delay effect.

They live in this realm of microseconds or going into nanoseconds. So it's that comfort zone. And it's looking through the--

looking through the lens. I talked very briefly about systems get light, and you get oscillations.

I mean, telecommunication engineers call this an echo. An echo on a phone line is really annoying. An echo cancellation is such a known technology. And it's very, very well understood. But we go in power systems.

Oscillations are happening. Inverters are kind of bouncing signals off each other. Go, OK, that's quite easy to tune out. Maybe let's start looking at this.

And audio geeks as well. Audio geeks use this stuff as well.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah, absolutely.

But yeah, it's very, very cool, and I'm glad someone's doing it.

And so who are your customers? You've got National Grid. You've got the grid folks.

And then also you're now working with DNOs, right? Have you signed any deals with DNOs? Are you doing pilots?

We're doing pilots. There's none we can talk about publicly yet. But there's a couple in the--

a couple in the States.

So we're on this internationalization journey. We have an office in Melbourne. So I think Australia will be a real hub for us. They've had a blackout in 2016 due to low inertia.

A very, very interesting energy market. We have an office in Dubai. If you look at the grids in the Middle East, they are decarbonizing incredibly quickly, like they're going from 0 to 100 very, very quickly. And they're looking at all sorts of other technology investments they can make alongside that.

And then we have the US. And the US is a very, very different market structure. And some of the DNOs are actually very, very forward thinking over there and really want to start trying to understand the strength of the grid, where they don't have any visibility.

And the strength gets particularly low when you have a really rural area with long lines and you put a load of solar on it. Because the UK is relatively small, we actually don't have too much of that. We do have some voltage issues. But it's a sort of bigger order of magnitude in the United States. So we're seeing a big take-up in the States for this DNO offering.

And do you guys have intellectual property? I saw--

there's a press release you guys raised 15 million-ish not too long ago.

Let's talk about the company for a second. So what's the vision?

And I know you got a lot of technology. Is that protected? What does the future look like for you guys?

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah, we have 200 patents, which is good going for 50 or so staff. Like to keep the patent to staff ratio nice and high.

I did not found the business. The business has been going for around 10 years.

There were two co-founders--

Mark, who's based in the UK, and [INAUDIBLE],, who's based in Finland. They had a previous business together in semiconductors and in near-field communications. So they kind of defined the chip design for near-field communications.

As in Apple Pay or that kind of stuff.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Absolutely.

Yes, and they sold that business to Broadcom and then thought, what's the next challenge? Energy.

And let's look at the engineering. So that's kind of the seed of the company. And that's how we kind of came up with this mindset.

You mentioned fundraising. So yeah, we did a fundraiser in the middle of the COVID lockdown, which was interesting. You're going to investors and saying, please trust me. I would like some money. But you've never met me. You've only seen me on Microsoft Teams.

So it was tricky, and it took a little bit longer than we anticipated. But we've got a really good set of investors out the back of it. So we're now backed by Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy Fund.

That's a big name.

CHRIS KIMMETT: It's a very big name indeed and an amazing process that they put us through.

They sort of said, here is an ex head of R&D for General Electric. Used to have 1,200 scientists reporting into him. Prove to him that your technology works, then I'll talk about your business case.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: [CHUCKLE]

So you have kind of a real kind of hurdle with them. It was a really interesting process that they ran. We--

Have you met Bill, by the way? You met Bill Gates?

CHRIS KIMMETT: Not met Bill, yet.

Or Melinda. I don't know whether they do it together, or I actually--

I don't know anymore.

I think Breakthrough Energy is definitely a Bill thing. I think the foundation. I don't--

I've not got into their personal matters.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Do you get a Christmas card? That's what I want to know.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: You should send a Christmas card. You might get one back [INAUDIBLE]..

OK.

That's a good idea, Yeah we'll do that.

The other investors that joined were BGF. They led the round. They're a financial investor. They've raised money from high street banks.

British Growth Fund.

And they're very, very strong on governance, exactly. And Eaton as well, who are kind of a strategic investor.

Ah, yes.

CHRIS KIMMETT: They--

Electric bods.

Electric bods. They make every kind of electrical hardware that you can think of. But they're also having a really big push into software and data. As we said earlier, everybody has a SaaS or a DaaS platform now, and they're making a really big push into that and making some kind of key strategic investments as part of that push for them.

Cool. And then is your business capital intensive? I know there's a lot of R&D you guys have to do. But do you have to buy a lot of stuff? We talked about containerized bits earlier, like a ultra capacitor or measurement devices. Do you have to build this stuff from scratch, or can you buy it off the shelf, off a container, you know? Anyway, and yeah, does it cost a ton of money?

No. So the device that's sending a signal into the grid--

effectively, we get our customers to buy this.

Grids are incentivized to own a large piece of capital and get a return from it. That is the entire model of regulated monopoly. So effectively that we build for them and sell to them. So it's on their balance sheet, not ours.

The measurement units, those do sit on our balance sheet.

But they're relatively lightweight. Usually with a grid kind of measurement box, it would be a pretty big, hefty thing. You would put it in a substation. You have to shut the substation down while you install it.

Again, with the kind of engineering mindset we have, we measure frequency from a wall socket. So we plug in to a domestic level wall socket, and we measure frequency from that. So it's a plug and play device.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Ah, this is so cool.

It's relatively lightweight in terms of [INAUDIBLE]..

There must be so much noise that you guys have to cancel out. It's such a noisy, noisy signal.

It's an incredibly noisy signal.

Frequency is always described as a random walk. And there's a whole load of noise on top of that. And on top of that, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. If you're looking for a 5-megawatt signal on a 50-gigawatt grid, it's a very, very, very small signal to look for.

Because, to put it in context, you can get those--

you can get ethernet over your home power network, right? And you plug a thing into the wall there. Plug a thing into the port, thing into the wall there.

And whatever they tell you you're going to get, you don't get anything like it. And that's very clever, but it's very short distance. And--

Yes. And there's no transformers in the way that you have to try and hop the signal.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: There's no transformers in the way. And even that, you wouldn't really want to--

you wouldn't really want to rely on it. And you guys are doing it with a tiny signal over massive distances on a grid with 50 gigawatts on it.

Yeah. And you've got generators banging in and out and smelters banging in and out. But there's a lot of both maybe art and science to shaping that signal, making sure that it can propagate through the grid, making sure that you can extract it from the noise, and then there's a whole load of techniques, including repeating the signal many, many times as the most basic.

But then there's lots of other techniques to extract that signal from the noise. And there are lots of other techniques on top of that to kind of get the meaning out of it because once you've got the frequency signal, you still need to understand, what does that mean in terms of inertia?

What is that signal telling me about inertia? So there's kind of layers of IP.

But you can design it as like a fingerprint either end, right? And you can design a fingerprint for a signal with a little box it's very difficult to do that with a massive capacitor, an ultra capacitor. And yeah. So,

Although modern-day inverters, we sort of went on this journey. And we thought, can anyone really create this signal? And actually, an engineer, in 10 minutes sitting with an inverter went, you mean this signal? Oh, yeah, very clever.

You know, the modern kit is very, very good and very accurate, pretty much drawing any shape you want, which has been fantastic for us.

Yeah. I remember--

I'll go back to my university days. But yeah, fast Fourier transforms in digital signal processing, you can basically play--

it's how you can, with a 100-quid box, create the sound of a Stradivarius or whatever that is.

It's the same thing. Yeah, digital killed the radio star, as they say.

All right, cool.

And then where's the company going? So you've got these two products plus the new one that you're launching soon. Very excited to see that, actually. That might be very interesting to us and our customers. So we should talk about that. And then, what's the vision? Where do we go in 10 years, 20 years with Reactive Technologies?

Yeah, absolutely. So the job is scaling, and scaling means a couple of different things. One, we've proven that we can deliver this in the UK. We can do it at scale. We can prove that it works. We get the data to National Grid.

But on the path to a profitable business, you need to do that more than once. So part of that is that international journey. And part of my role as the chief operating officer is, how do we go on that scaling journey? How do we actually deliver this five times, 10 times, 50 times? Ultimately, we think there'll be a big demand for this product, and it's a relatively kind of a blue ocean space. It's a relatively clear space for us to compete in.

Similar with the DNO offering--

this energy trader offering, this relatively new one, this is kind of the first then branch into, what else can we use this data for? And we have this product going live towards the end of September.

Beyond that, we then think there's uses of the platform for a renewable generator that's trying to connect to the grid to understand the power quality, to understand the harmonics, and not only at the point of connection, but maybe also during the course of the life of the thing.

There was actually a famous example in Australia. There's a large battery that, during the course of a firmware upgrade, they accidentally deleted the droop curve. So it stopped doing frequency response. And its whole purpose and meaning of life was doing frequency response.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Someone got fired.

Whoops.

The regulator took them to court. They didn't just get a performance penalty. They took them to court. So actually, monitoring the performance of the asset and the customer could be the grid that wants to monitor the performance of these assets.

Or it could be the asset owner that wants to have a--

double check that something hasn't gone wrong.

It's very hard to sort of move and change a big spinning asset, but it's very easy to change the firmware of an inverter, for example. So we think there's a whole load of other applications that we can build on this platform.

So we're going to scale what we have in multiple different geographies and prove that we can kind of deliver this. But then we're also going to look at adjacent markets, all related in energy and electricity.

But we think there's lots of different places, and there's lots of different parties who would have an interest in grid stability and an incentive to either do something about it or better understand the grid stability to inform their operation.

And I guess the more grids you put it on, the more training data you have, if you like--

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah, that's right.

--to learn what's normal and what isn't.

And it puts us in a fairly unique position. If you look at the GEs and the Siemens and the [INAUDIBLE]

of this world, they build a box and they sell the box, and it goes out the door. And the grid has the data. Whereas we're rolling out the infrastructure ourselves because it's lightweight. You can plug it in a wall.

We roll out the infrastructure. We own that infrastructure, and we have that data, so we can train the models on it. It's not somebody else training models on the data. We have the data ownership, and we're able to build that platform and build that asset.

Data leading the world, turns out.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Yeah.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: I want to ask you a very, very difficult question to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

CHRIS KIMMETT: Sure.

If you had to put your finger on the core bit of IP here, because we've talked today about a whole ecosystem of an end-to-end solution, right, which when put together, it's very complicated but is innovation together. But you've got 200 patents also.

So is it measurement? Is it signal creation? Is it time stamping? Is it hardware? What's the core bit that you're, at all costs, will protect?

So--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: And how does it work? And give us the drawings, please.

Yeah, indeed. They're in the patent. You can go and research them. No, so IP's very, very interesting. In a lot of industries, you see a huge amount of kind of this incremental innovation.

If you look at semiconductors, if you look at phones, people are patenting these tiny little parts of the system. There's a couple of patents we have which are incredibly broad. We have one broad patent with then a whole load of associated families.

But the broad patent is around the inertia measurement technique. It's the concept of sending a signal to a grid and measuring inertia. That concept of being able to inject the power and take that measurement, that's patented as a technique.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Wow.

That's the real powerful one that's kind of at the core. And then we have a number of other families that hang off that, as you said, around, how do you form the signal? How do you actually take these measurements?

Cool. Very cool. Well, we've pretty much run out of time. I just want to say thank you.

Is there anything you want to plug? This is your--

this is your moment.

I feel like I've done my plug.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: You've done your plug.

End of September I think we've got a product coming up, trade energy, that will be very, very relevant for your audience.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Awesome.

And yeah, keep your eyes peeled or ears peeled, or--

it'll be on websites and social media and--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Awesome.

--get in touch with Reactive.

And now my time to plug because I've been told by our producer we've got to start plugging stuff. So if you're listening to this, you may have seen that we launched thebessjobs.com,

which is a jobs board for people getting into batteries. We need about 100 times more people into this sector to do renewables and get to net zero.

So if you're looking at joining the sector and you're listening, please do head to thebessjobs.com.

While we run the site, we actually don't really--

it's not to make money. It's just to get to go from zero to one.

And do remember to hit subscribe. And that's it. So thanks very much for coming on.

Thank you.

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