Matt Neal and Sergey Kynev with Siemens Energy

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Siemens Energy, grid solutions, transmission lines, grid stability, STATCOM, reactive power, data centers, power generation, renewable integration, AI data centers, power quality, system operator, regulatory environment, industrial collaboration, industrial news network.

00:00

Scott. 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

00:21

04:39

doing today? Doing good.

04:43

Did you guys have a good weekend?

04:46

Well, I had a long week. I was on vacation for the whole week of the fourth so I'm a little rusty this morning. This got my wheels turning. Would you go just to the north Carolina Beach? Where else? Yeah,

04:58

where else? Did you guys get storm? Wasn't there a storm coming in?

05:04

Little bit of rain? That was about it. I

05:06

was all hype. Oh, that. I thought Armageddon was going to hit, hit the coast. No, apparently not. All right, for the listeners out there, let's level set. Let's do a little background on who Matt and Sergeant Sergey is. Matt. Give us a background on who you are.

05:23

Yeah, I am Matt Neal. I work for Siemens Energy. Live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm responsible for our North America business for grid solutions, and that is a business that we build substations we stabilize the grid with our fax devices, and we build HVDC projects for large, bulk power transfer. So it keeps us busy.

05:50

You're throwing out a sort of a quick little acronym. What did you say? Sort of,

05:54

so I'll start so fax devices, F, A, C, T, S, flexible ac, transmission systems, HVDC, high voltage direct current. So where we, yeah, we transfer power long distances with DC power, and we do that with our converter stations. So

06:16

see, there you go. Be careful of those, those acronyms, i i Will stub my toe in a big way on those things, and they'll all call you out, Sergey, give us a little background on who you are.

06:27

Yeah, my name is Sergey Kynev. I'm working in the same office as I met, and I spent my entire career with Simmons, Simmons energy now 14 years just started after I graduated, and I spent it all in a group which design and manufacture great stability equipment. I started in our headquarters in Germany, and seven years ago, I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, just to be focused on US market, and always been doing engineering for grid stability equipment like STATCOM or east.com which we might touch on today.

07:12

Very cool. I have to ask Sergey this, this grid stability, which we will be talking about probably the majority of the conversation. Now it's tough not to talk to you, Matt about what you guys trust me, I I'm pulling the reins a little bit. But when we start talking about grid stability, we talk about transmission, we talk about the power generation side. We that that makes sense. Does does your solutions also address stability down to the distribution

07:44

level. It's a well, it's kind of, we focus on transmission, and if transmission, and there is no stability in transmission, there is no stability in distribution, right? But we, our market, is mostly focusing on a large devices, which would mostly apply to transmission. There are some cases where we would also do distribution, but we focus on kind of large, tailor made projects which would target the high voltage.

08:16

I'm going to digress a little bit. We will get into STATCOM e STATCOM, we will be talking about that. But Matt, how do when I was a lineman many years ago, you know what conversations we were having? We need more transmission lines. We need more capacity. And we and, and you know what we're talking about today. We need more transmission lines. We need more capacity. Are we built? Are we making the existing transmission system more efficient so that we can use what infrastructure we have? Or are we actually building transmission assets?

08:58

Yeah. I mean, if you just look to the last 10 years, and I've been in transmission about 10 years. And, you know, originally, I mean, we've been growing in that entire time. Right now, I would say we're in, like, hyper growth as far as building transmission assets. But a lot of it was at the you know, and again, about a decade ago, we really started to see the penetration of renewables require us to do so much more build out of the grid, and then now we are doubling down, or having to, like I said, this hyper growth we're in with the load changing, and the load from data center load, I mean, if I just speak about the US from RE reshoring manufacturing, just population growth, consumption of power. So it's a I think it's a question that those of us in the industry all want to answer yes to because we're so focused on reliability. But I think there's definitely a and. Don't want to say the word fear, but a general concern in the market that it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on.

10:07

Yeah, I get that same sense. I do and and you just can't flip us shot. I shall use this analogy. You can't just flip a switch and be able to say, more transmission lines, more substations. Here we are. We. They take time. They take planning and and I struggle with balancing this, this rapid market evolution that's taking place, and just the physical realities of yes, we need to do that here and and, and, thank goodness for companies like uh Siemens that that, that do that now Sergey give us a little sort of background into STATCOM. E STATCOM, give us, give us what, what that solution helps us with,

11:01

yeah, yeah. So maybe let's start what is the stability of the grid, right? And why are you concerned about it, right? It's all boils down to like a power system. As a system is always like a balancing act on balancing two major parameters, which is frequency and voltage, right? And frequency is kind of easier to understand. This is a balance between generation and the load, right. So we want to keep frequency stable, but we also want to keep voltage stable, right? So voltage need cannot be too high and it cannot be too low, right? Because our equipment manufacture. So the way you control voltage is something, what we call reactive power in a power system, right? And for someone who maybe not coming from a power system, reactive power is a bit of a weird concentrate. It's not something you can use as a work is not something which will make your toaster works. It's something which is kind of, think about it as a support system. So like if, if a fuel in your engine is an active powers and directive powers and greases, is an oil right to make it running right, and this keeps the voltage. And there is only few devices in the grid which can provide reactive power and can control voltage, so STATCOM is one of them, and this is what STATCOM is all about. STATCOM stands for static, synchronous compensator, and this is a device which you add to your power grid, and it automatically controls the voltage, right by providing, I

12:43

just dive in here real quick with that product, that solution, where do you, where do you place it? I mean, it can't be, it has to be strategically placed in a area that makes sense,

12:58

right, right? Yeah, ideally you will have a fleet of them connected to the key transmission substation, right? And don't think about like a device, like a small box. It looks more like a substation, like it will have its own building. It's a pretty large, like medium sized substation. Think about it this way, right? And you're connected to the key transmission points, which would be sensitive to the to the to the voltage and to the reactive power. As often, you know, you talk about like we are not building enough transmission line. Often the limit is not enough transmission line, but the limit very so, so called stability limit, right? We are not letting so much power to flow through this line because the voltage hits the limit, right? So adding a STATCOM, you can unlock some some transmission capacity through your line by just adding this device before building more light. So there are a lot of cases like this where you build you can unlock this potential.

14:10

See what I see happening out in the market today, given the challenges and given all of the demands being placed on today's grid. Matt, it just seems to me that more focus is necessary on ensuring a stable grid so that consumers like me can not worry whatever we've been in countries where that doesn't exist and it take it for granted, but here we don't. And it would seem to me that that the solutions that are being offered by Siemens Energy have to be quite nimble, because it's changing so quickly. How? How does Siemens Energy do that?

15:00

Right? Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is, we work with a lot of partners. We even have our own capabilities to run studies, so that we're constantly trying to look ahead and predict where these new load pockets are going to be, where new generation is coming online. And also just this technology that we're talking about here today, the STATCOM that Sergey was was mentioning, they're a lot more flexible than they were in the past. Like there were, there were previous generations that that of devices that offered similar services to the grid. And one of the big advantages now of these modern stat comms is that they are power electronics based and then they have very sophisticated control systems that are controlling them that allow them to also adapt as the grid changes. So there's a lot more flexibility in buying these assets that we offer to our customers than when we used to put kind of fixed capacitors or reactors on the grid? Yeah, I mean, a those, even those that equipment has really long lead times. So if you had a change, whereas, hey, this reactor is not big enough, or we need more, you know, more capacitors over here. I mean, we can't wait two years, right, or three years for them to be delivered. But with these new power electronics based solutions. We can go into the control system and modify them to provide other services, or simply change, change how quickly they ramp up, how quickly they ramp down. Those kind of things that allow the grid to to kind of change as we go.

16:40

Is this solution? Sergey, I think of the system operator. I think of what their responsibility is, and, and, and does. How does the solution sort of interact with their obligation to just make sure supply matches demand, clean all of the stuff. When I say clean, I'm not talking about renewables. I'm just talking about power quality. So how does this solution work with the system operator? Yeah,

17:12

and this is a very important point and a cool thing about STATCOM, it's kind of work autonomously, because there is so much control and so much brain to do its own decisions, right? So it's not only waiting for operator command to switch on or switch off, like a capacitor bank would be, right? A typical, classical example, like an operator sitting and seeing a voltage gain too high. Okay, let's send a command and trip with capacitor bank, right? With a STATCOM. He doesn't need to do all of this. STATCOM provide the whole range of power. It's not just zero and full. It can do anything in between, right? And it's fully automatic. It looks it has its own control system. It looks at the voltage and has a command settings of controlling this voltage. So, in a way, operator doesn't need to do anything. It does it automatically, and it does it very precisely and extremely quick, right? We are talking about milliseconds, right? Because in a power grid, a lot of stability what we're talking about, if there is a long term stabilities, but there is also this trend in stability and like effects which are happening within milliseconds, and it's just too quick for any operator to react or do anything like this. You need devices which would react almost instantaneously to the grid. And we during design, we would run a lot of studies, a lot of contingencies, or we would model different events which might happen, and agreed and demonstrates the capabilities of STATCOM.

18:46

It would seem to me, that's a that's very to the point I appreciate that, sir, because I, I, again, my my thinking is, is sort of old school. And I, I remember going to the system operator back then, and they were, they were just intently focused on Mac, you know, making sure that power that demand and go on and so forth. It would seem to me, Matt, that as we continue to venture into this brave new world where we're we're see greater demand on our transmission system, greater demand for power generation, that the electronics need to be more automated, per se, so that we can have a more efficient and responsive grid. That's where we have to go, because, as a system operator, I can't, I can't. It's just too much, yeah, automation,

19:46

yeah. And, I mean, I think that's, that's what we're talking about here, and it's also, I think the that that flexibility is, is also needed, because. Of how we do our system planning, right? I mean, there's a lot in the news about how we do long range planning, or lack of long range planning, and how we're always kind of behind that the plans that we're using to build the assets of today are probably even outdated, right? So we really, as OEMs and technology providers are having to kind of provide flexibility, and, like you said, automation and our solutions to deal with the complexity and the regulatory environment of kind of, yes. You know, system operators giving utilities the freedom to go buy the assets they need is sometimes not there, so they have to buy assets that are flexible.

20:43

She just, you just knocked it out of the park, on on identifying the planning component as well as the regulatory environment. This is what, what dazzles me, being a part of the utility business for many years, utilities, as well as the regular regulators. They're not known and I guarantee you, it has not been put into the same sentence. They're not known for being nimble. And this requires some sort of a nimble mindset to be able to recognize that things are happening fast. I've got to sort of respond with some sort of urgency to be able to sort of satisfy the demands of the market. Is that correct? Sergey,

21:27

yeah, definitely. I mean, we are, in a, in a way, a bit of a conservative industry, and for a right reasons, right? We we need to be in conservative industry because we rather be slow but reliable, right? And go and break things. You know how in other industry it might happen, right? Because we don't want to break things, but it's just the speed of a change. What's happening now? Right? Everyone been thinking the speed of renewable integration was crazy. But now look at the data center right the speed of they coming in is it's just fantastic. It's it's bigger than what you ever saw our industry saw, at least in this country,

22:16

lad talk to us about these data centers, because I heard a lot about them. When I was at some of these conferences, the demand for power is going through the roof. The demand I heard somebody talk about the need for generation, right, is going to increase three times coming in the future, whenever, whatever that time, three times greater demand for power as a result of these data centers, and we're not going that genies out of the bottle. How do we? How do we, how do we address that? Sergey,

22:51

yeah, it's a very interesting time to be a power system. Definitely, there is a lot of challenges coming with this. It's not just how large they are. They're also large and concentrated in one place, right? So some of data center we see in a scale of a gigawatt or a two gigawatt, right? It's a scale of a city. And like, what's happening? If this data center is tricked or something happened, right? It's, it's just very huge impact to the power grid. And there is another aspect, yeah, yeah. And then there is another aspect of this, what we see, and it's very kind of a new phenomena to the to the power grid, the ways the load behave, especially when you look at the AI data centers, right? They are very different from conventional data centers. What we know which use for streaming and cloud services, AI data center, they're not there to save data. They are more to compute data, right? Processing, the processing, yes, they use GPUs, right? That's why the NVIDIA stocks are so high now, right? But for electrical engineers, this looks very interesting, right? It's look like the whole load is no longer steady. The load is peaking within milliseconds, sometimes seconds, and then peak back, depending on whatever as the model you run on this particular AI data centers, whatever computational software you're running. So it's very unique behavior of the load, which we haven't seen before, something we saw very similar to this was coming from Arc Furnace. Right Arc Furnace would do something similar, where the load is not studied. You probably know this, but in a much smaller scale, and we've been deploying. Our solution, STATCOM, to smooth it out for for many years, right? What is unique for for AI data centers, this is a real active power demand and peaks, and what we see, a lot of interest, is basically to take our solutions, that is the STATCOM, what we talk about, and enhance it with some, some form of storage, which would smooth out this load fluctuation and make it more friendly towards the grid. And what we are using, we are adding to the STATCOM. We are adding super capacitors, and we call it E STATCOM. So adding energy to the STATCOM to be able to provide not just reactive power, what we talked before, but also active power, and to smooth out the fluctuation coming from data center. So this is kind of a very new topic. Elsa to us, what we're working on right now.

25:55

You know it, Matt, it's happening, whether we like it or not. It's these data centers. If you ever go to Reston, Virginia, that's a pretty cool place. There's a lot of there's a lot of data centers there. And you don't even know it buildings, data center alley, they call it, yeah, that's right, man. It's, it's very cool, without a doubt. So here's the here's what's taking place in the market. It's going to continue to increase. It's going to continue to put the demands on the grid. It might be, it might be interesting, and they're going to have to figure out how to make sure that, that their their grid is, is stable and clean and running, running, well, what? What are some of the pushbacks? What? What? What are some of the saying now I don't need I can't see anything. I can only see that these data centers, these solutions, they must be hand in hand,

26:50

yeah, yeah. The way I see it is we really need to get all the right stakeholders aligned. We have the utility partners. We have technology providers like ourselves, data center owners, regulators, and we all need to come to an agreement that the problem needs to be solved, because it is a bit of a of something I think is sort of falling back on the utilities, but they've also never, never dealt with gigawatt scale customers that have a fluctuating load, right? So we're in a little bit of a who needs to solve the problem, who's going to pay for the problem? We can't put it all back on the ratepayers who just want to, you know, power their toasters, right? So there's a lot of, I mean, and Sergey is involved in a lot of committees, a lot of technical committees and a lot of conferences ongoing right now, because we're, we're getting closer and closer to gigawatt scale AI data centers wanting to be connected. And we're, it's kind of that tsunami wave we see coming at us. And we have solutions, I think. And I think admittedly, there's a lot of different solutions out there. They're all, you know, they all have their positives and negatives, right? I think we think ours is, is a good one, and so does some other similar companies to ourselves. But we really just need to get in the room and agree on how we're going to move it forward and start putting some, you know, putting some things on the ground, because, like I said, they're going to be connecting soon?

28:22

Yeah, it's happening. It and it is. It's gonna happen. But here's you brought up, you sort of skirted on it. You know, it's the rate case. It's the rate payer. It's in there who's paying for this. And as you know, as well as I do, I don't want to pay more? Yeah, I want, I want to be able to sort of go online and do my AI stuff and whatever it might be, but I don't want to pay that's those are all really significant challenges. And it goes beyond that's a that's a whole nother conversation, to be able to figure that out, and honestly, it's way above my pay grade.

29:02

Yeah. And I often like to say that we don't give ourselves enough credit in our industry for the fact that we provide probably the most economical product in the world. Is we sell electricity to millions and millions of people for a couple $100 a month, right? Yeah, it's and with 99.999% reliability, right? And and we have to maintain that while we deal with all these challenges that we talked about today,

29:29

exactly, it's, it's an exciting time. It's really frothy, of of just insights, and it's just really meaty. Because I, again, my My view was very linear. Now all of a sudden, you know, yeah, how do you manage these sources of generation? How does it impact, you know, like electric cars, okay, they're plugged in. I don't know how a system operator deals with that. I don't

29:59

they. It? Well, that was the one before AI, and now it's not even talked

30:03

about, right? Yeah. Very good. Sergey. As we wrap this up, how does people say, Man, I want to know more about what's happening at STATCOM e STATCOM, what's happening at Siemens Energy. How do they get a hold of you? What's the best way to do that?

30:24

You can find my name in LinkedIn. I'm the only Sergey. Or you can contact us. Events, energy, if you are electrical engineer, come to IEEE conference will be the one in Austin in few weeks, are we gonna be there is a lot of different task forces and standard development groups which were involved, yeah, just contact Simon synergy, and we will have a very interesting discussions.

30:59

LinkedIn. All right, Matt, best way to get a hold of you.

31:03

Yeah, same. If you go to the Siemens Energy website, you can find us for through our grid solutions group, again, based here in Raleigh, North Carolina, or you can LinkedIn as well. But yeah, we're if anybody has any challenges to what we said today. We'd love to hear them,

31:24

because it's all about collaborating. It's all about getting the right people in the room discussing these challenges. It's the only way to happen. You guys were absolutely spectacular. Thank you. Thank you for finding time. This was a great conversation. All right, listeners, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. We're going to have all the contact information for Sergey and Matt out on industrial talk. So fear not reach out, put them this is these are must connect individuals. So stay tuned. We will be right back.

31:54

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network. You

32:04

yeah, did I tell you that we just sort of scratched the surface of what they can do. There's so much going on out there that that if you're not committed to trying to continue to educate, continue to reach out, these individuals have these conversations you're gonna be left behind. I guarantee you're not seeing the full picture. You have companies like Siemens Energy, and individuals like mad and Sergey who make it their business, make it their profession, to be able to look, look into what's happening to solve your problem, right there. LinkedIn, reach out. Make it a make it a point. Again, I touched upon it. Industrial news, network, industrial news, dot network, that's URL. We're changing the game. We want you to participate. You need to succeed. This is the platform that lets you succeed. Be bold. Be brave. Dare greatly. Hang out with these two gents. You're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.