The founders of a new grid known as the Faraday Grid said it could save consumers more than £1 billion a year by increasing efficiency as renewable energy production grows.
The company aims to modernise the grid by replacing existing technology with a network of devices called Faraday Exchangers. These are able to handle greater variations in the power supply caused by renewable energy production, which chief executive Andrew Scobie said will improve the grid’s stability, balance supply and demand, and reduce the cost of energy.
Speaking at the launch of the prototype in Edinburgh yesterday (12 December), Scobie said: “What you’ve had for the last 132 years is a transformer which gives the system efficiency, but is inflexible. As variable renewable energy goes through the grid and demand itself is no longer able to cope. Grids are crashing more often because of the increasingly dynamic nature of supply and demand.”
Scobie said the increase in renewable energy necessary to reach government targets will put such pressure on the grid, meaning that without new technology, service and maintenance costs will rocket: “If you go down the current path you’re going to see energy costs probably treble by 2030, because of the extra cost to make the system work.”
The Faraday Exchange is a control device that maintains target voltage, frequency and power, efficiently over a range of operations. When the product becomes commercially viable, Scobie said it will be in a position to replace the 867,000 transformers currently scheduled to be changed in the next 20 years.
This could generate revenue of £6.5 billion by 2040, he said, and save 54 million tonnes of carbon – the equivalent to the carbon emissions of around nine million people.
The company was founded in Australia before its founders relocated to Edinburgh because they believed Scotland’s heritage in engineering and availability of PhD students was more advantageous to the development of the technology.
The company has a partnership in technology development with Scottish Power and UK Power Networks, with a view to rolling the product out across the UK.
There is a US launch scheduled for 2018, but Scobie said the UK rollout is more likely to be in 2019 or 2020, because of compliance and certification processes.