Charles Murray with Switched Source

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Scott MacKenzie, renewable energy, power electronics, energy storage, distribution utilities, transmission systems, phase EQ, load balancing, electric vehicles, grid reliability, Siemens, distribute tech, industrial professionals, evaluation tool.

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Welcome to the Industrial Talk podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go all right once

01:36

again. Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you industry professionals all around the world. You know it. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you solve problems each and every day. That's why you are making the world a better place. That's why we love you. Love you on Industrial Talk, you are the heroes in this story, we're brought to you by Siemens. Siemens smart infrastructure and grid solutions. Go out to siemens.com siemens.com they have great people, great solutions, great company. Find out more. You will not be disappointed. Go out to siemens.com we're broadcasting from distribute tech on the floor Dallas, Texas, is the location, and I'm telling you, it's it's bigger, better, stronger, faster, and if you're in the world of utilities, in the world of transmission, in the world of power generation, in the world of all of the stuff that makes that happen, and you're not here, you're missing out. Put this on your calendar. It is a it is a no brainer. Great people, speaking of great people. Charlie Murray, in the hot seat, the company has switched source. Do I know anything about it? Absolutely not. But will we? Yes, we will. Let's get cracking.

03:00

Hi, Charlie, Hey. How you doing?

03:03

No complaints, none whatsoever. Why would I complain? I don't want to complain. You don't want to listen to me complain, and that's what that's all about. Don't complain. You having a good conference?

03:15

03:24

You got your steps and getting over here? Oh,

03:26

yeah, well, this is a good place to get your steps in, you know? Yeah, big, big conference. Seen a lot of people move around, actually come and visit all the booths. So it's, it's been great so far. Yeah,

03:37

I don't giddy, but again I, I, once again I, I'm in the salt mine. I and, and at the farthest end of the this complex, I hear there's great stuff there. There is, and I'm having great conversations. But anyway, before we get into the conversation about switched source. Give us a little background on who you are, Charlie.

04:05

So I'm a electrical engineer by training. Started my life working in the renewable energy development space. Had a lot of different jobs in that space, working on construction, development of projects, was a subject matter expert for all things electrical engineering was coming out of school at a time when power electronics were getting included more and more in a lot of these different types of generation. So we were seeing power electronics included in wind turbines, you know, the large scale wind turbines you see driving down the highway, as well as solar projects, solar plants. And so that was kind of my expertise, blended that with some of the power systems expertise, and that was kind of my bailiwick for seven years, working over on the Renewable Energy and Energy Storage development side

04:49

of the world. Yes, well, Matt street cred, thank you very much. I think we can just wrap up the conversation saying Charlie has street cred. Go reach out to him. All. Right? We have to the elephant in the room, switched source. Talk to us about switched source. So

05:07

towards the end of my tenure, working in that renewable energy development role, I was trying to develop a lot of energy storage projects, and working with a lot of utilities across the country about how we could deploy energy storage on their systems. And there was something that kept coming up there, which was utilities could use more capacity either at the transmission level, at the distribution level. When you say capacity to find capacity, capacity is the ability to deliver electrons to end users, you know. So we're talking about residential customers, commercial customers, industrial customers, like cap banks, you know, it's, it's something or something bigger, something bigger, you know, it's not just talking about how, you know, a capacitor bank could potentially boost the voltage, and it's about, you know, how can we actually get the electrons through the wires, kind of through the pipe, to those end customers? And, you know, when I heard about that, you know, energy storage was kind of a an interesting fit for these utilities, but there were some challenges associated with that. And if you think of an energy storage system, there's typically the battery on the back end of it, and the front end of it is this power electronics gateway that they call an inverter. And what we started to realize as a company was there was this opportunity to have power electronics as a controllable gateway, but instead of sticking a battery behind it, stick a different wire, a different part of the infrastructure that wasn't being used as much as the wire that you're trying to help and so what we did is we looked at the different architectures of distribution systems, transmission systems, and said, Hey, maybe there's a way for us to kind of balance out different load pockets with power electronics. And that was the genesis of the idea of our company was we wanted to build tools for distribution utilities to be able to make the most out of the systems that they have today by leveraging power electronics, because a lot of these power electronics technologies are getting more mature and they can actually be deployed at the voltage levels that distribution utilities really care about. So that was the sort of genesis of our company, and kind of where we started all of our products from, was

07:03

this idea for clarification, power electronics. What do you mean by that?

07:07

Yeah, so these are devices that, you know, can be switched very rapidly at high voltages. They're, you know, combinations of semiconductor switches with capacitors, different filters and things like that, so that we can take, you know, alternating current electricity, you know, generate that from DC signals, do different types of transformations and actually control the flow of electrons through the wires,

07:33

and you strategically place these devices in areas that have greater demand.

07:39

08:55

have. Sound like that? How do you how do you determine, do you work with the utilities and saying, okay, here, here's here, here's one of those congested areas that needs help. And how do you go through that?

09:07

There's, there's a lot of markers for for what circuits are a good fit for us. A lot of utilities have data on the the circuits already, where they know what system imbalance looks like right at the feeder head. That's right where the three phase enters the substation. And so we can typically use that to say, Hey, this is a circuit where we're going to be able to unlock meaningful amounts of capacity for your distribution utility so that you can, you know, accommodate more load growth from electric vehicles, or just have an easier time reconfiguring the circuit if a storm rolls through and you want to be able to, you know, perform actions, to switch in loads and out loads, we're going to make the utility operators lives easier there

09:43

you get that do you get the information from a system operator? How do you get that information?

09:50

We typically engage with the distribution planners, and so these are folks that are looking at, you know, what are those investments we're going to have to make over the next year, three years, five years, to make sure that we can. Deliver quality electricity to folks without overloading our system.

10:04

When, when you deploy these solutions, how quickly can you deploy them? Because, like, Hey, I over here in this phase right

10:13

there. Yes, so the electrical connection to the system takes a few hours. It's really, really fast to actually get the unit deployed. The long pole in the tent for us right now is, you know, this is a pad mounted device, and so we have the core foundation for it, so that can take anywhere from, you know, week to a few weeks to cure. But the actual electrical, electrical connection goes in a few hours, doesn't require an outage for any customer on the entire circuit. And, you know, it's quick, it's safe,

10:38

helps. How does it not require? How do you do it hot? So

10:42

there's a there's a feeder drop that they'll do down the pole, and they'll leave an open slot for fuses to connect that feeder drop to the main circuit. So they're able to do all the electrical connections back to our box with dead wires. And then at the last step, what they'll do is they'll put the fuses into those slots, slap it, yep, connect us right back in. We're a shut device, so we're in parallel with the grid. You know, there's, there's no electricity that's flowing to a customer downstream of us that has to go through our box the way that, like a voltage regulator or something like that,

11:14

might work. How, when does the Forgive me, if I get it wrong. How does your device get called? Let's say i Everything's fine. Everything's fine, everything's fine. Oh my gosh, it's not fine. I need that.

11:29

Yes, yeah. So we, we have this device mostly automated in terms of monitoring what that system balance looks like where it's installed. So we can measure different things about the electrical grid. We can measure different currents and different voltages, and then, you know, exchange these electrons to balance out that traffic. We also agree with the utilities about what system conditions they want us to stay connected in, or if they want us to drop offline. So if there is a tree that lands on a branch and it causes a voltage sag, we can define what the utilities Hey during these voltage sag type events. You know, if it goes below 80% voltage, we'd like you to drop off the line. That's all something that's programmable inside of our device.

12:08

Yeah, that's that's important if you have some veg management issues and you don't want to so do you from that? Are you collecting the data? You're collecting that information, you're sending that data back to the utilities, this is what we got. Do you agree what? There's got to be some gold in that, that

12:28

13:11

Does your device have? I mean, if it's if it's on off, on, off, on, how does that? How does that impact the reliability of that asset.

13:21

So we like to leave our devices on all the time. Utilities do have the ability to turn them off remotely, if they so choose when the device is online, even if there is some sort of storm related reconfiguration of the circuit, we can ride through that and we can rebalance the circuit dynamically. So if there is a group of homes that was cut off from power. The utility wants to be able to restore service to that group of customers, but they're not really sure how that is going to land. From a phased imbalance perspective, with the load that's already on this energized circuit, they can have more confidence that we're going to be able to dynamically rebalance it as it's switched in, and that's one of the key benefits of the device here again, just comes back to that dynamic ability to respond. You know, that's where we're seeing. We're really helping out these utilities as they're trying to increase reliability and resiliency

14:08

of the grid. Yeah, no, I agree with you 100% when we start talking about distribution, what voltage do you go up to? Up

14:16

to 15,000 volts right now? 15? Yeah, we're trying to go higher and

14:22

higher. Do you think there's some, some, some interest in, in a transmission type of solution?

14:29

I think so, you know, I think right now, there's, we're seeing that there's a lot of impact we can have at the distribution level. But I would say, you know, maybe one years down the road,

14:36

it's huge. Come on, there's plenty, yes and, and you're pretty much, do you have an international desire? We're looking 50 cycles.

14:51

We're looking international too. Yes, there's, there's lots of places throughout, I would say, for the way the electrical system is set up right now, we're seeing, there's a lot. Similarities between how our electrical system works, how it works in Central and South America, other places with kind of similar population densities. So lots of opportunities there.

15:10

Okay, put your future hat on. Where do you see it going? I mean, what the world of utilities and switched source? Where do you see it going? What's that? What gets you excited? I

15:23

think you know what? What gets us most excited? We know there's an immediate opportunity for us to kind of unlock this load serving capacity for some of the electrification and adoption of electric vehicles. You know, we think that we have a really big role to play with reliability the grid and making it easier to reconfigure. And you know, it's going to take, I would say, a decade for us to really reach our potential there. So we're pretty excited about the growth we got in front of us

15:47

there. I like this conversation. That's very cool. That's nuts and bolts, right there, baby. How do people get a hold of you? Charlie, they

15:54

should go to our website, www. Dot switched, source.com. Switch.

15:59

Did source? You get it? Are you out there on

16:02

LinkedIn? Yes, stick me out of LinkedIn? Charles Martin, yeah,

16:07

they will, because I'll have that link or not on Industrial Talk, most definitely because you're nice. Thank you for being on Industrial Talk. All right, we're gonna have all the contact information for Charlie. Here's his card. See right there? Just card, and he's president, switched source, yeah, reach out to him. Put that on your your to do list. That's important because he's he's important. They're doing great stuff. And if you're in the world of distribution and transmission and and passive manager, you just need to be a distributor. All right. We're brought to you by those wonderful people at Siemens smart infrastructure and grid, grid software. Sorry, I vapor doubt on that one. Go to siemens.com find out more. You will not be disappointed by any stretchy imagination. We're broadcasting from distribute tech here in Dallas, Texas. Put this on your calendar. You. You have to. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned.

17:04

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

17:12

I love all conversations around distribution, transmission, power, generation, utilities. I love it big time distribute Tech was the event. As you can tell, Charles Murray, the company is switched. Switch source, go out there. We're talking about Michael grizzly. We're talking about how the industry is changing. Whether you like it or not. It is a great industry to get involved with. You get to meet people just like Charles and others, and be able to really it's a renaissance, by the way. I have an e book out there. Industrial Renaissance is the e book. So it's all about what's taking place in the world of industry, as well as utilities and the solutions. It's all out there you go to Industrial Talk. It's above the fold. We also have an evaluation tool as well, a workbook. It's all out there. We want you to succeed. We want you to take advantage of all of this incredible stuff that's happening. We want you to succeed. All right, be bold. Be brave. Dare greatly. Hang out with Charles. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.