How to Solve a Problem
Enoda PRIME® Exchanger emerges in the negative space of a problem closely defined
At ENODA we never start with the answer. We start with the problem and then we optimise a design, fit for purpose.
The transformer, and by extension the present energy grid, of which it is the heart, was developed to provide cheap, reliable energy. The grid was a massive improvement over contemporary solutions like gas light and coal grates in city home, however environmental impact, the cleanliness of energy generation, was not the design focus of Stanley’s transformer. As the nascent grid grew and systems were built to rely on it, the capacity and shortcomings became entrenched. Nonetheless it must now be made to fulfil that third need, cleanliness.
To go from reliable and cheap to reliable, cheap, and clean adds a third dimension to a two-dimensional solution. Just as colour television was beyond black and white screens, it was a problem beyond the historic solution. However, a world where massive and instant value is not available at the nearest socket is foreign to almost every human alive today. Progress is measurable, but against what do we measure? Human expectations are not fixed. The prosperity that has transformed human experience to a state unimaginable to any city resident in 1886, is simply no longer acceptable. A product of our success is our redefined expectations. We demand prosperity, security and a sustainable global environment in which the energy that delivers our very prosperity and security does not reduce our environmental choices.
Despite systematic under investment in the grid for more than half a century, it remains one of the largest investments ever made. It carries an analogue signal, whose purpose is not to transmit information or knowledge, rather to provide access to electromotive force, enabling consumers to do work. That work is enormously distributed and heterogenous, but exclusively undertaken by technology owned by someone.
Collectively, we have made another one of the largest investments ever, built atop the grid and predicated upon the signal it conveys. Our investments in generation, refrigerators, train systems, lights, information and computing systems, heating and cooling, television sets, and factories, every one of them assumes an analogue AC signal. It is verging on unimaginable that we would replace the system and all our dependent technology.
If the grid cannot simply be replaced wholesale, as it is inextricably integrated with all modern systems, then any viable solution needs to be retroactively compatible with the existing system. Unlike the implementation of other major systemic change, for example 5G, it doesn’t need new end-user tools, phones, or new infrastructure, telephone poles.
The beauty of an analogue system is that in theory this change is entirely possible. The challenge is that in practice it is so difficult no one has imagined a scale relevant solution, let alone realised one. Yet, the essential prerequisite is, such a solution continues to utilise two of the largest investments in human history.
As a system to provide reliable alternating current power to consumers, the grid relies on the physical properties of large spinning mass; a mass that is inherent to fossil fuel energy generation, a mass that provides both primary power and system stability— and that is not implicit to renewable sources. To balance this essential characteristic of renewable sources, and impact of changing load profiles, the grid requires the provision of additional system stability and AC signal or power flow optimisation. The power flow needs to maintain congruence with an optimal 3 phase AC signal with a specific frequency, voltage, power factor and phase balance. The move away from fossil fuels requires a complete re-conception of the energy grid.
ENODA not only bridges the gap between the tools of the past and what the future demands but maintains a system that is pareto optimal long into the future. The solution depends upon making the grid intelligent, to regulate and optimize signal quality, and the dispatch of power must be both deliberate and coordinated. With Prime Exchangers and ENSEMBLE, the grid can be made legible and controllable by an active co-ordination mechanism.
How change occurs
While the grid cannot in its present form fulfil its newly defined purpose, providing clean, reliable and cheap energy, we can take comfort in the fact that this is not the first time a system’s design has become obsolete. This is our single best opportunity, for it to be replaced with a materially better design. Copper wire switched telephone networks were not fit for the internet. Copper wire networks weren’t suitable for mobile telephony. Horse drawn transportation was slow, expensive, unreliable, as well as a public health, environmental and moral problem. In each instance their replacement did more than solve underlying issues, they massively increased economic productivity and social well-being.
The first step is recognition: it must be recognised that something fundamental needs to change. The answer must be more than small fixes, a salve to symptoms, or short-term and unscalable solutions; we cannot continue to apply band-aids to the grid. Triage is important, but it must be followed by a cure for the underlying causes. Systems that are no longer fit for purpose grow costly, burdened by technical and regulatory redundancies, they are subject to negative network effects, limit choice and are subject to increased probability of total systemic failure.
Contemporary answers have fallen into two categories, a litany of partial and temporary fixes that serve only to further complicate any subsequent solution, or naive hypotheticals that choose to ignore associated costs or consequences. Neither resolve the fundamental need for change, rather they inhibit it. In the first instance, disparate and disjointed stopgaps compound, eventually requiring more fixes just to keep them together. In the second, key requirements are handwaved, or worse, treated as inconsequential. A true solution must be wholistic, realistic, and above all designed to minimise economic burden.
To fulfil its newly defined purpose, the locus of control for the electricity system needs to be aligned with the most efficient decision makers. These decisions need to be made on time scales relevant to both the grid itself and to the consumer. This implies intelligent devices coordinating the relationship between our intentions and the grid, and across the grid itself. As esoteric as that sounds, it is no different to the internet, where in our experience we simply don’t notice the coordination being undertaken by machines on our behalf.
As Schumpeter[1] and Christensen[2] suggested, companies predicated upon old technology are rarely capable of creating the solution. Their revenue and their sense of self as individuals in an organisation are all embedded in doing what they already do. This “path dependence[3]” is not exclusive to the companies, it is observable in governments and regulators, system operators and utilities. It stretches even to the general public; it is neither necessary nor reasonable for individual economic agents to account for the costs and inputs to the economic whole.
When the challenge is profound, the solution requires an understanding that is not fixated upon the apparent complexity. Existing assumptions and memetic, fast thinking cloud the perception of what is possible. Faced with challenging problems, what we think are our best tools are often crutches that disable our path to resolution.
Many power systems engineers think an AC system needs inertia. It doesn’t, the system needs signal stability, inertia is simply an existing mechanical means for providing signal stability. An economically viable, secure transition to a sustainable future requires a series of insights to a technoeconomic solution beyond the assumptions that define the existing systems. The internet was not a straight-line extrapolation of the fax machine, gas lamps didn’t give us AC power, and switched telephony systems didn’t give us smart phones. For a system that provides consumers access to the only one of the four fundamental interactions of the universe we have ever expressed any control over, those insights have a very close proximity to the physics.
The order emergent from a technological shift does not take its impetus from within the old order, but from concerted and co-ordinated pursuit of purpose. Enoda has from its inception been intended to make systematic change, to solve the most pressing technological problem of our time, and to do so entire. Each element of Enoda’s solution is intended as a piece of a whole, a comprehensive approach, designed to have the greatest positive impact with the fewest economic, structural and systematic burdens.
[1]Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)
[2] Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997)
[3] Paul A. David, Path dependence, its critics and he quest for ‘historical economics’ (1998)
