The world’s electricity infrastructure is full of transformers, the pieces of equipment that change voltage as electricity passes through the grid. They are present almost everywhere, from power plants to phone chargers. For the most part, they have remained unchanged since they were first developed in the late 1800s.
This longevity is a testament to the original design but also to how little the mesh has changed in the intervening years.
However, with distributed renewables, batteries and electric vehicles, change is coming to the global grid faster than at any time in the last century. Electricity no longer has to flow primarily in one direction, from a handful of massive power plants to millions of end users. Instead, each of these end users could be the same energy provider, and this has made life difficult for the humble transformer.
In addition, the demand for transformers has exceeded the offerslowing the development of renewable energy projects and increasing costs.
Enter solid state transformers, which promise to be what the vacuum tube integrated circuit was. Traditional transformers are passive devices, unnecessarily stepping up or down the supply voltage. The solid state versions promise to do a lot more.
For years, it was little more than research projects. Ampereand hopes to change that. The electronics startup has raised a $12.45 million seed round to help the team commercialize its silicon carbide solid-state transformer technology it developed in research labs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The round was led by Xora Innovation, Temasek’s early-stage arm, and Material Impact. TDK Ventures and Foothill Ventures participated.
Sparks fly
Today’s transformers are proven, very efficient and relatively cheap. But they are also bulky and cannot help with voltage or frequency regulation. If it either overspeeds or falls too far, it can destabilize the grid.
As more things are added to the grid — from solar panels to whole-house batteries and EV fast chargers — there’s a greater chance that things will go wrong. An inverter in a wind turbine, which produces frequencies that rise and fall with the speed of the wind, can produce constant power slightly different from another model. The same could be true for battery controllers and solar inverters. “There is no uniformity, there is a lot of randomness,” Anshuman Tripathi, co-founder and vice president of engineering, told TechCrunch. “When that happens, you need to have an active front end.” This active front-end will not just take the power as it is given, but also help smooth out the randomness.
Solid state transformers can fill this role. However, it will be several years before risk-averse utilities decide to use them, so Amperesand is starting to sell to EV charging companies to power their ports.
View of the Amperesand facilities. Image Credits: Ampereand
“EV charging is a great use case,” said Phil Inagaki, CEO of Xora and interim CEO of Amperesand. “The scale of what people are thinking of developing in the world with EV charging creates the biggest market for transformers.”
In addition, solid-state transformers are smaller than their predecessors and have lower cooling requirements, meaning installations can require up to 75 percent less space, Inagaki said. “If you want a fast charging station in a city, you might not have a lot of space,” he said. Even outside the cities, space is an important factor. “People in the fast charging space, I was surprised, are reporting it more than I thought.”
Amperesand said it can scale its transformers to suit the needs of different locations. Unlike traditional transformers, which are monolithic pieces of equipment, solid-state transformers can be built using modules. Need more power? Just add more modules.
Transforming the way transformers are made
For a company looking to sell expensive network-connected equipment, $12.5 million won’t go far. Fortunately, the startup doesn’t expect to need to build much manufacturing infrastructure other than some final assembly near where the transformers will be used. Some semiconductor manufacturers can manufacture the silicon carbide devices, and there are even more suppliers who can provide printed circuit boards. Amperesand plans to deliver the first units to the US and Singapore in 2025 with full commercialization the following year.
“Old transformers rely on iron cores and oil coolers. These things are very difficult to scale in manufacturing,” Inagaki said. “Nothing is advancing performance and cost like semiconductor technology.”
And because solid-state transformers are basically semiconductors, they are loaded with sensors that can give grid operators finer-grained data that will give them deeper insights into grid performance.
Once the company proves the technology and attracts customer interest, Inagaki believes Amperesand can grow revenue quickly. “This doesn’t look like low-end units,” Inagaki said. “We think this is a type of company that could quickly [reach] the first $100 million in revenue. It has plenty of room to reach a $1 billion revenue rate without even undercutting the overall market in terms of infrastructure development.”
If the company succeeds in cracking the market, it could put the network on the path to the “internet of power” that pundits have been touting for years. Such a grid would not only depend on raw signals from a few points, but would instead be drenched in data. It can react quickly to peaks in demand, such as when electric semis plug in for charging, or respond to power surges from solar-powered neighborhoods, or call on distributed batteries to stabilize the grid when clouds pass over those neighborhoods.
It will be years before the Internet of Power arrives, but solid-state transformers could become the cornerstone of it all.
