Modo Selects - Measuring inertia with Chris Kimmett (COO @ Reactive Technologies)

If the grid is really resistant to that signal and the amplitude is very low by the time we measure it. That means it's a really high inertia grid. Whereas if the signal flies through the grid and it's really easy to measure. You've got a really low in it.

Oh, I have so many questions about this. Good. So so you guys inject pounds to the grid -- Correct. -- there's a little bit.

With a certain waveform. 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.

But no bread. So but no bread. Just hot air. Don't.

When when you say a light, remind us what you mean by a light. Low low inertia. Low inertia. 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 and stuff and in the UK about thirty percent of total inertia today. Is on the distribution grid. I love I love this conversation. It's because it's almost like a reductionist approach to ever get philosophical about it.

Okay. Productionism and approach to electrical systems. You know, we say in the UK, we've had a fast renewables transition. But in reality, it's been ten years.

We've had some time to get used to it. Data of eating well turns out. Hello everybody. Welcome back for another episode of our Moto Select series.

Today, we are revisiting an episode with Chris Kimmett. Chief Operations Officer at React Technologies. If you're enjoying the podcast, please consider hitting like and subscribe. It really means the world to us.

Let's jump in.

Alright then. So, what's reactive technologies? Chris? Reactive technology. 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 always say the control room back in the day was a bit like driving a steam train.

You've got this very very heavy machine that's burning a whole load of coal it's very stable. It kinda 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 a different design of market to catch that motorbike as it's falling and yeah our technology helps a 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 with various Well, mostly good news really. You've raised 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 businesses selling data to grids exactly that like like this.

National GridSO is our kinda 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 now Yeah. Everything's like a third now.

I 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. Also, 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 you. Right? Yeah.

So I've been at Reactor for five and a half years. Mhmm.

I joined to run the grid business unit. So five 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 -- Okay.

Great. -- big toaster right in the middle of 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 sign. Is it it like, is it?

How how how how does that work? So the way I was trying to explain it is think back to the August twenty nineteen blackout. Yeah. Where people stuck on tubes in London in the dark.

Don't think about that bit. Right. Right. Right.

Think about the the physics of the event. So we had a who yeah. We had a one named. We had a one and a half gigawatt power swing.

Yeah. If the frequency fell really slowly, that means we'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 five megawatts of energy into the grid instead of one thousand five hundred.

And we take the same measurement. So we're sending this pulse of energy, this five 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 it's a really high inertia grid, whereas if the signal flies through the grid and it's really easy to measure.

You've got a really low inertia grid. Oh, I have so many questions about this. So so you guys inject pound's the grid -- Correct. -- 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? Yeah.

How do you don't need you need to be met though, there's time syncing problem here over distances. How do you do that?

GPS. So GPS gives you a very, very accurate time stamp. So we have one location where we're sending this this this pulse out into the grid. For the pilots, we use load banks effectively a a massive toaster turn.

Yeah. Enough? Very low CapEx, but you wouldn't wanna run that for a long time because you just make loads of heat. By the way, so people who haven't seen these things, they look a bit like peaking plant.

They're like they're in -- Yeah. They're in containers or whatever. Yeah. And it is literally just a a sink of power.

You're 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.

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 two seconds roughly into the grid. So we're going to full import, then full export, then full import, then full export, every two seconds.

And if you go to any battery investor and say hey, I'm gonna 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 caps super resistant degradation. So we built a bespoke asset to provide this service to national grid. It will be there for the for the long term. So we have a six year contract.

Delivering this data from this asset and yes, that's the model. This is so cool. So what does an all took a pass the words all took a pass to get me very excited. Okay. But what does one look like?

Well, it looks like a shipping container that says 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 a chemical form.

An ultracapacitor is effectively storing energy like static electricity. It's got two plates and you're storing static.

Yep. Electricity on those plates is like when you rub a balloon on your hair, you've got that static chart 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 the biggest continuously operating ultracapacitor anywhere in the world. Love us.

But not probably not in the universe. There's probably some aliens with mass ultracapacitors somewhere That was the the words also just makes me think about, yeah, interstellar stuff. Yeah. It's a bit something something a bond villain would hack.

Yeah. It is. It is. So who's in the company?

Who's who are the bond villains?

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

We we've got fifth fifty four people -- Mhmm. -- roughly split fifty fifty between the UK and Finland. So everybody in the UK is from an tristy background. So before I was at Reactive, I was at Open NG doing demand side response and before that come from the world of consultancy and sustainability consultancy.

Mhmm.

So everyone in the UK is from It's probably worth a mention. You you used to work with Robin who's up here. I do. Moder Robin now, but it used to be open anyway.

Moder Robin. Yeah. That's right. Yes.

We used to work very closely at Open Energy. So, well, maybe we could talk about them on-site response as well later. Yeah. Yeah.

How this is going?

So fifty four people, everyone in the UK broadly from an energy background, some power system engineers, some real like 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 x nokia engineers. It's gonna ask you about when there's a few nokia folks. Yeah.

So we're basing a town called Oulu. It's about a hundred kilometers south of the arctic circle. So it's really far north in Finland. Which is where Nokia used to have their R and D center.

Yeah. 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 will 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 it's a very different order of magnitude. And fourier transform and forms and the look the look the laplace domain. All of this stuff they they they obsessed 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, you know, a very light power system. Be it Scotland or Australia. You start to see oscillations.

Oh, when we when you say a light, remind us what you mean by a light. Low low inertia. Lower pressure. 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 of information. Let's do it. I'm putting you on the spot here, Chris. Yeah. What is inertia?

What is inertia? So If you have the the physics version of it, it's measured in joules, it's energy.

And it's the the the spinning mass in a in in a power system. You can think of it in a in a very similar way to if you're riding a bicycle, if you're riding a very big heavy bicycle or use 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 gonna carry you quite a long way.

It's gonna kinda ride through problems. And we see that in the power system with frequency responsive. I've got a frequency event. If I lose five hundred megawatts or so, high inertia system, the frequency falls very gently in slowly.

A low inertia system that's more like your lightweight carbon racing bike or it's moving from that steam train to that 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 is literally how heavy the 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 the the 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 that kind of thing. And that that was very useful for the last hundred years on the grid because it kept grid frequency and and high inertia, a very heavy system. But we were placing those technologies with wind and solar that are connected behind inverters.

Right? Or power systems -- That's right. -- power conversion units. Which are electronics.

There's nothing big spinning. It's thyristors and things happening. Yeah. Which is a different world.

And so we we Although, we're getting 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. Yeah.

So before you guys, how was National Grid keeping an eye on inertia? Or Every so every grid globe globally basically has a model of what they think the inertia might be. So each of the big transmission connector generators are connected into their scarred system. They can see them in the control room.

And they'll make some assumptions about this has a steam turbine as if 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 okay.

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 a very -- which also provides motors are inertia as well.

Right? If it's spinning, whether it's generating or consuming. Say about fans, all this kind of stuff. And in the UK about thirty percent of total inertia today is on the distribution grid.

If we decommission all of the coal and gas plant, that thirty percent is gonna turn into fifty percent sixty percent or a hundred percent 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. You know, 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 eighteen percent of their total inertia in the distribution grid. Wow. So even when they think there's, you know, nothing there. We just have sheep in tourism.

We don't have heavy industry. You know, 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 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 our competition today is our customer.

Yeah. Yeah. My customer has a model. They're familiar with the model.

They kinda know the model and we're coming along and saying, we know the grid better than you. So what about 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 hope it's more complicated than this. But across the whole grid, this is how much noise we have. Can you can you pinpoint where it is, you know, there's some in London, and there's some in Scotland, that kind of stuff? Yes.

You can. Measure. We call it regional inertia. Mhmm.

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. Yep. 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 and each state has to carry a minimum amount of inertia because it's a long thin grid unless there's a risk of islanding.

So we can measure it regionally. We put measurement units in the 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 measurement So are you guys seeing are you seeing how to answer ask this question 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 we were probably both working at aggregators back in sort of twenty sixteen, seventeen. Yeah. There was there was static non dynamic frequency response of static, there was a lot of EFR was just coming in. Yeah.

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

And now, you basically got sub second batteries providing all of it. So have you noticed a difference over time of inertia changing because of frequency response?

And all these batches load. So if you look at let's call it frequency performance. There's kind of different time domain. So inertia is really the first two hundred milliseconds of an event.

So even the fastest battery isn't doing anything within that first two hundred 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 changed quite well. There'll be some battery bugs that complain at this point.

Because in in in DS three in Ireland, you have to do four response in a hundred and fifty milliseconds. And there's some fluent systems and 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 could still tell the difference between inertia and frequency response. Yeah. 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. No one's managed to to measure before.

But to answer your question, yes you can see that 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 on the frequency performance just appointing appallingly in comparison. High voltage, long distance transmission lines, the high voltage dynamic contain Loomineck.

I used to be an electrical engineer. A high voltage direct current line. That's right. So they've got one between Sardinia and the mainland that helps with frequency performance, particularly on the island.

It's not an interesting, isn't it? Let me go and check that out, put some reactor technologies out there and spend the week having pizza and pasta Not bad. Not bad. So what about internationally?

Which which which global grids have got lots of inertia and which which need more of it? And where are the problems Or is it across the board? Nobody's got a problem and you're gonna solve it all.

It's a good business. Oh, obviously. It's the last very good business. And and the world's I'd say, you know, has changed in the last five years I say the picture from when I joined reactive technologies the mantra was high renewable islands you know 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, you know, 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, you know.

Although they're part of the US contiguous continent, electrically, they're completely islanded. Yeah. And so, actually, when I went to the to to the US and I did and and didn't know that Texas was lined up. So why are they an electric island?

And the guy just said because Texas. Don't mess with Texas? Sure. Do you actually know what in it?

Where it is? I found this out. So I think it's they wanted to avoid the federal regulation in Yeah. There's a few reasons.

There's like some regulatory reasons. Also, the In Texas, we're definitely going off topic here, but here we go. They started as production of ice, so ice factories k. Got together -- Yeah.

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

And it grew out of that. Yeah.

And then since then, you know, they decided they wanted to just be their own thing. I did a really good job, apparently. The the nucleus. There's another similar one, which is Japan.

Japan has a fifty hertz grid. And the sixty dollars worth. Right? What is that?

Well, in, you know, in Tokyo, they were buying one set of equipment to do in Osaka, they were buying another set of equipment. In Tokyo they were buying the British equipment in the Sarko they were buying the US equipment. And these cities were so far apart, you know, by horseback Yeah. They thought, you know, these grids will will never touch, so it's fine that we're kind of building separate grids because they were building it for the the city without, you know, this vision that these cities would eventually grow and become one, you know, huge megalopolis.

So you have a fifty hertz grid in the north. You have a sixty hertz grid 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 on the metro, so right? You go to Yeah.

Yeah. If you go to Tokyo, you can bait there's there's a competing metro system. Metresistance, which again, I love. You know?

Well, we have that a little bit in the UK. You know, there's multiple different Birmingham train stations in London, and we have a whole load of train stations when private operators built a bit in Tokyo. They've really taken it to a big stream. I love it.

We got massive train stations right next to each other. Even with the same name in some cases, which is brilliant.

So anyway, we digress. Yeah. So grids around the world, Germany Islands, and they've all got a few problems. Yeah.

So so to five years ago, you know, it was definitely all about high renewable islands whereas the picture has just changed quite quite radically in the last five years, you know, 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 kind of taken for granted for so many years will decline much much quicker. You know, we say in the UK we've had a fast renewables transition but in reality it's been ten years. We've had some time to get used to it.

If we look at the next wave of renewables roller, if we look at the speed of implementation of wind and solar, it's gonna be very very quick and I think it's gonna be very hard for a lot of grids to keep up and to not be the bottleneck. That's absolutely right. Exactly. That's gonna become it's gonna 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. The humankind always gets tripped up by steep adoption, s curves of technology, and it gets steeper.

It feels steep now. Right? Oh, you know, we're building some some offshore wind. Great.

It's gonna get faster. And these grid issues are gonna get faster. Same with the the energy crisis right now and the -- Yeah. -- decades of under investment, we don't really get on that route.

But yet 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. Rative 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 I think we've done that one. And does it have a cool name? That's the most important thing. The overall product for Grids is called gridmetrics.

Grid metrics. Inertia measurement does what it says on the tin. Right? Metrics are an x on the end I hope.

That's correct. Excellent. Excellent.

So the the the main service and kind of the core of our business is offering these inertia measurement services to 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 kinda how my frequency is stable or not. System strength is the stiffness of voltage and distribution networks don't really care about frequency today. Yeah.

But we do really really care about 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 a grid that's spinning masses You got to invent a whole new language to describe this stuff to non engineers. Right? Yes. But, you know, strong weak, heavy, light.

Goodos. Yes. And then last but not least, we have this upcoming service launched at the end of this month for for energy traders for aggregators, for potentially for asset owners to also get this 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 detect So we've got these very very very accurate timestamp measurement units which taking forty eight thousand samples of data every second.

Which is a lot of data. That is a challenge. 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 to inform your trading strategy and to try and get an edge. You know why I love this company that your company. Right? I love I love this conversation.

It's because it's almost like a reductionist approach to aggregate philosophical about Okay. Productionism and approach to electrical systems. And really, a settlement period is a cycle. Right?

I mean, if you go if you go down low enough, I know there's a lot of challenge about that. Yeah. Maybe a couple of cycles. You know, in a moment, it's thirty minutes or it could be five minutes or it could be a minute in the future or half.

You know, when you get far enough down on the fifty hertz cycle, you're not going lower than, you know, fifty times a second. Yeah. And I really like the fact that we're as a 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, oh, 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, you know, going into nanoseconds. So it's that You got in comfort zone and it's it's looking through the looking through the lens, you know. I talked very briefly about, you know, systems get light and you get oscillations. I mean, telecommunication engineers call this an echo An echo on a phone line is really annoying and echo cancellation is such a known technology and it's very very well understood, but we go and power oscillations are happening.

Inverters are kind of bouncing signals off each other and you go, look, that's quite easy to tune out. Yeah. Maybe let's start looking at this. And audio geeks as well.

Audio geek introduces stuff as well. That's fine.

Yeah. It's it's very very cool, and I'm glad someone's doing it. Mhmm. 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. Have you signed any deals with DNOs, or are you doing pilots, we're doing pilots there's none we can talk about publicly yet but there's a cup there's a couple in the 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. Mhmm. They've had a blackout at twenty sixteen due to low inertia, very very interesting energy market.

We have an office in Dubai. If you look at the the grids in the Middle East, they are decarbonizing incredibly quickly like they're going from naught to a hundred.

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 like 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 states. So we're seeing a big take up in the states for this DNA offering.

And do you guys have intellectual property? And I saw there's a press release. You guys raised quite, you know, fifteen million too long ago.

Let's talk about the company for a second. So what's what's the what's the vision? Mhmm. And I know you got a lot of technology.

Is that is that protected? You know, what what does the future look like for you guys? Yeah. We we have two hundred patents, which is good going for fifty or so staff to keep the patent to staff ratio nice and high.

Yeah.

I did not found the business. The business has been going for around ten years. There were two cofounders.

Mark who's based in the UK and Haiki who's based in Finland. They had a previous business together in in semiconductors and in near field communications.

So they kind of defined the chip design for near field communications. As in apple pay or you know absolutely stuff. 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 the 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 a fundraising 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 got a really good set of investors out the back of it. So we're now backed by Bill Gates Breakthrough Energy Fund. It's a big name. It's a very good name indeed. And an amazing process that they put us through, you know, they sort of said here is an x head of R and D for general electric used to have one thousand two hundred scientists reporting into him.

Proof to him that your technology works.

Then I'll talk about your business case. You have kind of a real kind of fiddle with them. It was a really interesting process that they ran. We also got bill by the way. You might go gates. Not my bill.

Yet. Oh, Melinda. I don't know whether they'll do it together or I don't actually I don't know any of them. I think breakthrough Energy is definitely a a bill thing.

I think, the foundation. Oh, okay. I don't I've not got into the personal matters. You get a Christmas card.

That's not what I know. Not yet. You should send a Christmas card. You might get one back the week a year after.

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 raised money from high street banks. It is very, very strong on governance exactly.

And Eaton as well, who are kind of a strategic investor. You know, they they electric bods. Electric bods. They 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, you know, everybody has a SaaS or a desk. 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?

Is it, you know, I know there's a lot of R and D you guys have to do. But do you have to buy a lot of stuff? We talked about containerized bits earlier, like a ultracapacitor or measurement devices. Do you have to build this stuff from scratch, or can you buy it off the off the shelf, you know, off a container, you know, anyway?

Yeah.

And, yeah, does it does it cost a ton of money?

No. So the 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 of regulated monopoly. So effectively that we build for them and sell to them. So that sits on their balance sheet, not ours. Okay. The measurement units, those do sit on our balance sheet but they're relatively lightweight.

Usually with a grid kind of measurement box It'd be a pretty big hefty thing. You would put it in a 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 into a domestic level wall socket and we measure frequency from that.

So it's a plug and play device relatively lightweight in terms of There must be so much noise that you guys have to cancel up. It it is such a noisy noisy signal. It's an incredibly noisy signal. It's frequencies always described as a random walk, and there's a whole load of noise on top of that.

And on top of that, you know, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. If you're looking for a five megawatt signal on a fifty 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 -- Yep. -- home power net Right?

Yeah. And you plug a thing into the wall there, plug a thing into the wall there. And whatever they tell you're gonna get, you don't get anything like it. And that's very clever, but it's very short distance.

Yeah. And And there's no transformers in the way that you have to try and hot the scene. There's no transformers in the way. And even that, you wouldn't really wanna you wouldn't really wanna rely on it.

You guys are doing it with a tiny signal over massive distances on a grid with fifty 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.

You know, the most basic. But then there's lots of other techniques to extract that signal from the noise. And then lots of other techniques on top of that to kinda get the meaning out Yes. 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? Just how it's kind of layers of IP you can design a it's 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.

And all trigger passes are. And there yeah. Yeah. This so although modern day inverters, you know, we sort of went on this journey and we thought can anyone really create this signal? And actually an engineer in ten minutes sitting with Inverte went. You mean this signal?

Oh, yeah. Very clever. Oh, okay. 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'm going back from university days, but, yeah, fast fourier transforms -- Mhmm. -- in digital signal processing. You can you can basically play it's it's how you can you can with a hundred quid box create the sound of a stutter stutter various or whatever that is.

Yeah. It's the same it's the same thing. Yes.

Yeah. Digital kill the radio star, as I say. Alright. Cool.

And then where's where's the company going? So you've got these two products plus the 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 -- Yeah. -- about that. And then, you know, what's the vision?

Where do we go in ten years, twenty years with the active technologies? Yeah. Absolutely. So the the job is scaling and scaling means a couple of different things.

One, you know, 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 pastor of profitable profitable business, you need to do that more than once. Yes. So part of that is on it. That 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 ten times fifty times ultimately we think will be a big demand for this product and it's a relatively kind of a blue ocean space. It's relatively clear space for us to compete in. Similar with the DNO offering.

This energy trader offering is 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 the life of the thing. It was actually a 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.

Someone got fired. Whoops. The regulator took them to court. You know, 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 wants to monitor the performance of these assets or it could be the asset owner that wants to have a, you know, double check that, you know, something hasn't gone wrong.

It's very hard to sort of, you know, move and change a big spinning asset, but it's very easy to change the firmware in inverter, for example.

So we think there's a whole load of other applications that we can build on this platform. So we're gonna scale what we have in multiple different geographies and prove that we can kind of deliver this But then we're also gonna look at adjacent markets, all related, you know, 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 good 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 sort of slightly more more training data you have if you like, Yeah.

That's right. I have to learn what's normal and what isn't. And it puts us in a fairly unique position. If you look at the the GE's and the Siemens and the Schneyes of this world, they build a box and they sell the box.

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 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 of eating the world turns out. Yeah. I would ask you a very very difficult question to answer, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. Sure.

If you had to put your finger on you know, the core bit of IP here, because we've talked today about a whole ecosystem of an end to end solution. Right? Which when, you know, when you when when put together, complicated, but it is innovation together. But you've got two hundred patent patent patent patents also.

So what's a is it 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 And how does it work? Yeah.

And give us the drawings. The yeah. Indeed. They're in the pattern.

You can go and snatch them. No. The so IP is very very interesting. In a lot 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, you know, phones, people are patenting these these tiny little parts of the system. There's a couple of patterns we have which are incredibly broad. We have one broad patent within a whole load of associated families, but the the broad patent is around the inertia measurement technique. It's the concept of sending a signal to a grid and measuring an airship.

That that concept of being able to inject the power and take that measurement, that's that's patented as a as a technique 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, you know, 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 wanna say -- Okay.

-- thank you, but is it that you want a plug? Right? This is your this is your moment. I feel like I've done my plug.

We have a plug. And in September, I think we've got a a product coming up, trade energy that will be very very relevant for your audience. Awesome.

Yeah. Keep your ice peeled or ears peeled or it'll be on websites and social media and -- Awesome. -- get in touch with reactive. And now my time to plug, because I've been told by Absolute, so we've gotta start plugging stuff.

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