Design at ENODA
Why the Physics Must Come First
Design Principles
Broadly, ENODA’s design principle is to optimise the relationship between information, matter and energy.
Matter, how much mass in how much space, is changed by energy. The potential to do work is a nice way to say the ability to enact change. These are our objective facts.
Information, perception, value and purpose, these are our subjective components.
As information defines our perception, perception induces value, and value gives rise to purpose. To close our loop, purpose then directs our use of energy to induce change in matter. Purpose, as our intention towards the objective facts of our world, is dependent upon the subjective elements of human existence.
An optimised relationship between information, matter and energy is how ENODA expresses a commitment; to let humanity’s purpose, our wants and wishes and hopes, be fulfilled to the greatest degree.
You can achieve something once—to see something and do something: perception, then value, then purpose, then change. We see a brick and we imagine a wall; we want to make one from the other, we pick up our brick and place it on. Simple, easy, not exactly efficient. Let’s call this our process. If we wanted to build the wall more easily, the best wall for the least energy, we would design a system to optimise our process. We would use trowels and mortar and line runners. With co-ordinated use, tools become a system. Now that we have a system, now that energy is saved—we can use that energy to create something else. Maybe a nice cold drink in that house we just built.
The product and process of one system, our bricklaying and our wall, are the genesis for other systems and contribute towards the optimisation of other processes. And all the way along, more value for less work. Energy being put to more use in more complex ways. Network effects are great.
Multiply these ideas out, systems for making tools, benefiting systems for making walls, scaling into more and more value. More and more people contributing to and benefiting from that value, valuing each other, and you see how our first societies formed from our first tools, systems, and networks. Today, these are both a simple enunciation of our line from perception to action, and a near infinitely complex self-supporting network of systems.
It is possible to have an individual substantiation of something; you can hunt rabbits. Or you can have a system for managing multiple substantiations in a more efficient manner, you can have a rabbit farm. With multiple systems arises the potential for the same to apply to the systems themselves. With network effects and economies of scale, you start to change the economics of “access for all”.
The understanding and leveraging of systems-as-tools in the last 200 years has brought about a complete transformation of the human experience. Increasingly, the design of systems, which gave us economies of scale, have drawn the greatest value from network effects.
Roads, sidewalks and electricity systems, are examples of where understanding in the dimensions of systems, for the coordination of distribution and sharing of information, drove radical increases in human welfare.
This is why ENODA chooses to address a set of problems at the intersection of information, matter, physics and energy. It is at this point that we can have the greatest impact on human welfare, on our coordinating purpose; “sustainable prosperity for everyone”.
ENODA is focused on the general-purpose technology. On a design which can be universally deployed and can significantly increase not just the productivity of an individual instantiation, but of whole systems. As energy is the primary input to everything, optimising the design of the energy system’s general-purpose technology is to increase the productivity of everything and everyone. A network-effect maximiser.
This gives us the greatest possible return on what we can contribute to society. This is what coordinates our design focus and coordinates our team.
Despite the massively complex and sprawling nature of the systems underpinning our societal well-being, there exist a small number of relationships between modes, systems and existential states more generally applicable than everything else. By improving those, we create massively more value in return for our design effort.
When we undertake a close analysis of the constraints on any given problem, we must distinguish between those constraints that can be deemed arbitrary, though not necessarily trivial, and those that are physical and objective, surmountable but undeniable. The second form of constraint can be surmountable in one of two ways, the nature of physics changes or our ability to interact with the physics changes. Physics is yet to change. Technology changes. As a result, we need to understand what the technological constraints are in solving a problem, and how that can be changed or improved. Ten years ago, you couldn’t exploit the theoretical advantages of different carbides to produce a car. Today you can. To increase technological capacity is to broaden the scope of human action and intention. Our tools are determinative towards what we deem possible.
Design Applied
Because renewable energy sources are simply a conversion of transitive energy, largely from our sun either directly as light, or indirectly as wind, inherently they can be the lowest cost providers of power. While the cost of their variable input is low, their variability means that inherently, their input does not always match consumption – it’s not always sunny, and it’s not always windy. This low-cost form of energy generation is essentially, non-dispatchable. So what does that mean?
We find ourselves trying match low-cost, non-dispatchable generation with the provision of an AC waveform where timing matters more than 50 times a second for the system to exist at all. A problem that no one had solved in any manner that is scalable economically or technically. If someone had solved the problem, we would exist in abundance, having access to cheap, clean, reliable energy. We don’t. Consumer energy costs continue to increase, inflating the cost of everything. Anybody who says they have solved the problem wants you to pay more, accept climate change, or tolerate a failing energy system. By definition they have not solved the problem. Counter intuitively, markets with high solar penetration experience the greatest demand for balancing services daily at the time of maximum solar generation. These are typically provided by traditional large spinning mass thermal generators with the worst carbon emissions. Any solution in the first instance, must marry lowest-cost, carbon-free generation, and the electrification of load, to the lowest marginal cost provision of essential signal stability, and power quality.
ENODA set out to design a better system for the distribution of AC power to the consumer, agnostic to the nature of generation and demand. Such a grid could benefit from both economies of scale - the greatest source of present human welfare; and through cheaper, reliable energy. Making the grid itself agnostic to the nature of supply and demand, we can allow for that grid to become carbon free. With carbon free, low cost, reliable energy a new age of innovation can continue to derive value from the work of those in whose intellectual debt we are today.
To do so requires a complete re-conception of what the grid is. Instead of it being a quasi-static, quasi-passive system for the distribution of power, it needs to become an active, intelligent system that coordinates the distribution of energy between generation and consumption, independent of where generation and consumption occur across the grid, or the nature of that generation.
A supply-agnostic grid is no longer constrained by the source of its inputs. While it must still differentiate between them, the gap in utility and their value as inputs to the platform itself, means the differential is smoothed, and value is captured more efficiently.
The close scrutiny of the physical phenomena, and the close scrutiny of the problem posed by its constraints—on the current relationship between information, matter, and energy, needs to be co-ordinated by design principles. And needs to be made simultaneously through them.
What we have as a result, is a system for the coordination and distribution of an AC waveform, to the standards expected by a consumer.
The signal, it’s utility and value, is embodied in a physical phenomenon, in the electromagnetic spectrum. If we have electricity, we have magnetism because one of the fundamental symmetries of the physical universe is the conditional symmetry between electricity and magnetism.
Therefore, it is going to be an electromagnetic system. That is the key insight that William Stanley had on the back of Tesla’s work, on the back of Heaviside, Maxwell and Faraday’s work before them. The perception, proof, and process of experimentation exploring the potential of conditional symmetry gave us the transformer. However, that transformer itself was only an expression of what was possible within constraints understood at a moment in time and space. What now drives us, is to express what is possible at this moment and to further our understanding of those constraints in support of that pursuit.
The historical pursuit of these tools led to our present understanding of how we can move motive force from generation to consumption, between electrical domains and magnetic domains, nearly lossless, which makes the very existence of an AC power grid possible in the first instance. Today, we take for granted what was once indistinguishable from magic.
Because of these unchanging properties of physics, we are always going to have an electromagnetic system. If we are, then we have the opportunity to make full use of the condition of symmetry that describes the electromagnetic phenomena at the centre of all electrical systems.
Just as a transformer allows you to go from electricity via an inductive coupling, to magnetism, and then back to an electric signal again, we recognised that there was the opportunity to, nearly without loss, optimise that signal by voltage, frequency, power factor, phase and load, to ensure that signal without spinning mass generation would be optimal for consumers, providing the lowest marginal cost energy from renewable sources. Renewable sources can be the lowest cost providers as they are simply a conversion of an innate transient phenomena in the physics. Unlike the time defined AC signal, that transient energy is truly abundant. It is simply in the wrong place in time and space to meet our needs.
From this point of optimisation, what we are enabled to do is match the lowest cost provision of an AC waveform, with the lowest cost provision of the stability and power quality to the signal; a product of harnessing that conditional electromagnetic symmetry.
What became apparent for us, was that the solution needed to be optimised in the physics first, and treated as a controllable phenomenon second, rather than the traditional method of understanding it as a problem that needed to be controlled, and then exerting control over that phenomenon. ENODA has directed its purpose towards an optimal operating condition in the physics first, followed by control. Innovation in technology and methodology on a massive scale are our requisite undertaking.
