What kind of a difference can a spray-on coating make to your electricity bill? Well, that’s exactly the question asked, and answered, by a UK-based start-up, AssetCool, which last year won the Free Electrons contest, an annual innovation lab backed by ESB and five other international energy suppliers.
AssetCool has developed a system whereby high-tension power lines can be coated with various materials that improve their transmission of electricity. The coating is applied by an autonomous device that rolls along on wheels attached to the power line itself, rather like a drone riding an upside-down bicycle.
“We hadn’t come across anything like this before,” Donal Phelan, ESB’s head of strategy, innovation and transformation tells Business Ireland magazine. “Their technology is a coating that can be applied to overhead power lines so that they can carry more power − as much as 10-30 per cent more power.”
Essentially, the coating means that the power line can radiate excess heat out to the surrounding air more efficiently. Heat is the enemy of power lines and electrical transmission – ramp up the power too high, according to Phelan, and you’re in danger of causing components to melt.
RM Block
This is exactly the kind of innovation that the ESB is looking for through its engagement in Free Electrons. The idea is that start-ups are invited to present their projects, which are whittled down to a final shortlist through a series of online meetings, and finally meetings in person. The ESB runs Free Electrons in conjunction with Hong Kong’s CLP, DEP in Portugal, E-On in Germany, Canada’s Hydro Quebec, and Origin Energy in Australia.
The thing is that there is no actual prize for Free Electrons. The only thing the winner takes home is the plaudits for finishing on top. “There’s huge benefit to the start-ups by being in the programme, to the extent that we no longer offer a prize to the winner,” says Phelan. “The prize is you’ve won, and that’s worth huge amounts of money to them. They can take that literally: they can take that to the bank and raise finance as a result.”
So, what’s in it for the ESB, which, along with the other major utilities involved in the programme, has sunk around €16 million into the various innovations provided by nine years of the Free Electrons competition? “It gives us exposure to what is coming into the marketplace, and therefore what products we might be able to offer our customers, and how we might be able to change some of our technological focus,” says Phelan. “Some of the utilities – and we’ve only done a little bit of this – actually take up investments in the start-up companies when they’ve been really impressed by the ideas.”
Which is great – innovation needs to be encouraged, and start-ups incubated – but what does it mean for the average Irish punter, looking aghast at yet another hefty bill for electricity? And it’s worth pointing out at this stage that Irish consumers pay considerably more for their power than our EU cousins. In fact, only in Germany is electricity more expensive.
“It’s very difficult to put a monetary value on what Free Electrons does” Phelan says. “What I can say is that it definitely allows us to offer new services to customers that we couldn’t previously offer. It allows us to carry out works and improvements on the system at an efficiency that we couldn’t have previously procured. Equally, although we don’t advertise it, the cost of running the Free Electrons programme is incredibly cheap. It’s a very, very low-budget programme because the start-ups bear their own costs for taking part in it, and the utility’s costs are quite small.”
That might be cold comfort for some, but there is definite potential in the list of Free Electrons innovations for savings to be made and, one hopes, passed on to consumers down the line.
For example, there’s the arduous task of physically checking Ireland’s network of power lines. “Every year we used to have to carry out an inspection of the entire transmission network. And you would do that by putting up a helicopter with a technical specialist on board, and they would have to fly over the entire network,” Phelan explains.
“And we’ve reduced that down now, because we don’t use helicopters; we use drones. You still have a drone pilot, but you don’t have a technical specialist up there. The drone has high-definition video so it records, and a specialist can look at that in the days and weeks afterwards. And we’ve also, through the Free Electrons programme, actually found companies that can provide AI inspections of the same thing. So instead of going to a specialist who has to spend hours looking at it, you can send the footage to an AI engine, and it will carry out inspections of the headgear at the top of every pole and mast, and we have trained it to recognise the kind of faults that we’re looking for. So, at a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost, we’re now able to do that same inspection.”
Another Free Electrons boost was from a company that created a “digital twin” of the national grid and predicted – with great accuracy – where faults would occur in stormy conditions, meaning that repair crews could be warned in advance about the most likely spots where they’d be needed.
Speaking of storms, one of the big benefits of the Free Electrons tech extravaganza is a purely human one. “There’s a phenomenal set of personal relationships that we’ve established through Free Electrons,” says Phelan. “After Storm Eowyn, we were bringing in utilities from around the world to help us to rebuild the network, and an awful lot of that comes back to the personal relationships that people have built up.
“We didn’t need to spend six months trying to establish legal contracts between the utilities. We simply phoned somebody that we know well in the other place and said: we need help. And it works the other way too – ESB has sent technicians to other countries to help them when trouble hits.”
