Powering up the National Grid

Cambridge computer scientist Ramsey Faragher is in California and has been to Google's headquarters to play with a next generation smartphone called "Tango"  that even comes with a built-in laser! Chris Smith caught up with him to find out what it will do...

Ramsey - I got my hands on their project Tango, which is their brand-new prototype smartphone. It's everything you expect in a current smartphone, except it also contains a 3D laser scanner, 3 different cameras and 2 dedicated image processing chips. So, it can literally see and sense and map and image the world around it better than humans can.

Chris - What does it look like Ramsey?

Ramsey - Well, it looks like a normal smartphone. It's a little bit heavier and a little bit thicker. I think it's got slightly larger batteries because of all of the power consumption.

Chris - So, on the back of the phone where we would normally have just that one eye of a camera, there are two are there?

Ramsey - There's 3 things you notice - it has the normal camera you see and there's a source for a laser beam because it sprays infrared laser in order to detect the distance to objects. And then there's a special fish-eye infrared lens that picks all of that infrared laser light back up and measures which angle and direction it all came back from.

Chris - So, what's the point of this? How would I use it or how is it going to change my life?

Ramsey - Google have made 200 of these devices and given them to developers in order for people to start playing with them and start doing cool stuff. A lot of the things that I saw a couple of days ago, it was all augmented-reality games and augmented-reality applications. So because Tango can see the environment and it knows the distances and positions of all the objects in the scene, it can overlay information on the camera screen to change what you see of the world.  So, for example, I was chasing a cartoon bunny around the Google offices. I could see this little rabbit, and it could hide behind furniture, it could jump up onto objects in the environment even though it's just this virtual cartoon bunny. I think a big part of this will be playing computer games with people outside in the real world and interacting with the environment.

Chris - Could something like this be used to overlay anatomical information or a readout on the surface of the patient so the surgeon knows more precisely where that blood vessel is on the patient?

Ramsey - The kind of technology they're using, this laser-based camera technique, it will be able to overlay information on the real world to within a few millimetres back you see. So, you can see lots of applications for educational purposes and life-saving purposes. You can see a future where instead of people going on YouTube to look at how to fix their car engine and having to memorise it all, you can stand there, hold your phone and look at your car engine. And it will all be shown to you on the screen - what you need to do, what you need to lift, what you need to change, and so on.

Chris - And there's no danger with you going around zapping people with lasers flying out the back of your phone?

Ramsey - It's low-power infrared light that's being generated. It's actually a technology called structured light that projects a certain pattern of spots onto the world and if you are projecting onto a perfect flat wall, it knows exactly what those spots should look like. But, if there's objects in the way, the spots effectively move and the camera looks for these displaced spots and works out that there's an object in the way. So, it's eye-safe. It's not going to blind people.

Chris - Now, you're out in California, not just to go and see what Google are up to, but to go to a navigation conference. So, what's doing the rounds at the conference?

Ramsey - I'm sure everyone is familiar with how much the USA uses drones - not only in military operations but this growing use of autonomous aerial vehicles for domestic purposes as well. I'm sure we all remember the new story about the Amazon delivery drone back in December. The Federation Aviation Authority, the FAA over here has been trying to crack down on this commercial use.

Chris - Why is the FAA trying to stop people doing this, people have been building their own homemade aircraft for donkey's years? What's wrong with that?

Ramsey - It is all snowballing. They're now very cheap. They're very easy to fly. They have lots of onboard intelligence that makes them easy to fly. One of the biggest advances over the last few years has been, what's called "first person view flight". You wear a pair of goggles and you fly the plane as if you're sat in the cockpit. Now, this means you can fly it for half an hour in one direction. It may be 50 or 60 miles an hour, maintaining a link via the mobile phone network. So there are concerns over people making use of them for potentially dodgy means. And so, the FAA is trying to crackdown on people using these technologies. A chap called Raphael Pirker was fined 10,000 pounds by the FAA for flying his drone in what they said was "a dangerous manner". But he sued the FAA, claiming they had no authority to fine him or to take his drone off him, and he won. Basically, he argued in court - or his lawyer did - that they hadn't gone through the correct legal processes to turn these things into actual law. They were actually just recommendations. The judge agreed and it means that, in the words of some of my colleagues over in the States, it's the wild west. People can go outside and fly their drones around and the FAA can't come after them yet...

The present take-over bid from the US company Pfizer values the UK pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca at over 60 billion Pounds. So far, Astrazeneca's board have rejected Pfizer's offer, and politicians and commentators are expressing alarm at what a merger between the two companies might mean for British jobs and British tax revenues. But why are Pfizer so interested in acquiring AstraZeneca, and is it such a bad thing for Britain if they do?

Chris Smith spoke with former Venture Capitalist - now conservative MP for mid-Norfolk and lifesciences advisor to the government, George Freeman...

George - For the last 50 or so years post-war, we've been able to rely on the pharmaceutical industry to bring us every year new drugs, new treatments, new devices, a constant stream of extraordinary medical innovations. Even 20, 30 years ago, cancer was a death sentence. 98% of women now survive breast cancer. So, extraordinary advances but we have a problem in the pharmaceutical sector worldwide. The cost and time of developing new medicines got too long and too high. They can't afford to develop new medicines for us. We in the west can't afford anymore to buy these incredibly expensive new medicines. And, increasingly, what we have realised is the more we know that disease, and the more we know about genetics, actually, what was yesterday the blockbuster drug that we wanted, today isn't. What we need now are targeted and personalised medicines. The more scientists are unlocking the science to understand it, it's actually breaking the market. So, the whole model is changing and the big pharmaceutical industry's companies are really having to reinvent themselves. 

Today, it's all about working in hospitals with patients, with charities, looking at patients who've actually got disease and designing drugs for the patients who really need them. For too long, we've been buying drugs that the industry promises will work in everybody. And actually, in order for them to be safe in everybody, they're not working effectively in every patient. We're wasting a lot of money giving the wrong drugs to the wrong people.

Chris - So, how will this proposed merger between Pfizer and AstraZeneca deliver a solution to that problem?

George - This merger is actually driven by this dynamic. Here in the UK, we set out 3 years ago - the Prime Minister set out - a groundbreaking 10-year life science strategy to make Britain the best place in the world to develop modern medicines.

AstraZeneca, last year, in a stunning announcement, completely reinvented the way they work as a company. They closed down their old factories and are moving to Cambridge, England, to embed themselves in the extraordinary cluster of hospital, university and little companies.

Pfizer, in many ways, have been the poster child for what the industry have been doing for the last few decades - buying up other companies - in the quest to continue to deliver profits. But all these industries, all these companies, have got a basic problem: that their pipeline of new drugs is getting weaker. And so, when Pfizer announced that they're buying AstraZeneca, it's an extraordinary moment. And the question in the industry is, is this Pfizer buying the AstraZeneca model of 21st century drug design, or is this the last gasp if you like of the old model of a pharmaceutical company buying the other one out to diguise their underlying weakness in their pipelines?

Chris - The cynics could say, George, that why doesn't Pfizer just reinvent itself the way that AstraZeneca have then if it's so successful?

George - That's a really interesting question. Many people in the industry and many people within Pfizer are very excited by the fact that Pfizer are buying into this UK model of hospital-based and 21st Century medicines-design through acquiring AstraZeneca. And so there's a really interesting question here, I think, for the UK. I think we ought to be neutral about who owns these companies.

The question is, is the research being done in the UK, are British patients going to benefit, are British patients going to start getting access for new medicines again? There's a parallel here with the automotive industry. Through the crisis in the '70s, the British car industry has reinvented itself through Formula 1, high end components and supply chain. We've now become a net exporter of cars again.  Now the companies making those cars are largely foreign-owned, but the employment, the R&D, the technology, the assembly, the factories, the jobs are here in Britain.

There's a similar thing going on in the pharmaceutical industry.  I think we should be focusing on the level of commitment that companies like Pfizer and AZ are making to R&D are not worrisome actually about the ownership. The truth is these are global companies with global investor shareholder basis, global management. They're international businesses. The key is on the investing area in Britain in research for the benefit of British patients.

What we should be doing, I think, is saying to Pfizer and indeed to AstraZeneca, "We will sign with you a 10-year research agreement. We, the UK government, all the agencies involved here will sign a 10-year research agreement. They're very standard in the industry in which we make a series of reciprocal commitments to you and you to us. Will commit to all the things we set out in our strategy to adopt innovative medicines more quickly, fast tracking of clinical trials, quicker recruitments of patients, less bureaucracy, more access to working with doctors and patients in the NHS through the National Institute for Health Research.

That is the key to unlocking what we all want to see which is investment in the UK...

sFor over 80 years, homes in the UK other industrialised countries have been powered using a national grid system. This means that power stations all around the country can share the load and if one of them breaks down, the others take up the slack. And because our patterns of energy use are quite easy to predict, it's been a relatively easy task to turn power stations on and off in anticipation of when we will need them.

But, as we introduce new ways to make electricity, including sources like solar and wind,  the grid has a problem, because these alternatives don't produce power at a constant rate like a coal-fired station. When the wind drops or the sun goes behind a cloud, the power supply dwindles. So this week we're exploring how new technology - and even maths - can solve the problem...

One way to deal with this is to invent a new "smart" national grid system that controls how we use power according to how much is available.

Guenter Conzelmann is working on this at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago...

Guenter - We've done this experiment for 80 years. We can fairly well forecast what the demand will be the next hour, 5 hours from now or tomorrow. However, there's new technologies that come into play that change that now. If you now put a solar panel on your rooftop, what happens on a day when we have intermittent clouds moving through the area? In essence, your net consumption changes from almost minute to minute to second to second. And so, those fluctuations are very different than what we've observed for the last 70, 80 years. So, we have to be able to handle that and manage that.

Chris - Is it the dream that the grid will become switchable? It would direct energy into different places at different times in order to make it reactive.

Guenter - Very much so. But we're trying essentially to convert the grid from a flip phone to a Smartphone. And so, with that smarter grid, we can react to unanticipated changes. We can accommodate those changes much more rapidly.

Chris - So, the obvious question is, what's stopping you?

Guenter - Some of the technologies are available. It's just a matter of implementing those technologies and advancing some of the technologies.  4% of our electricity comes from wind power. If we're going to go 20, 30, 40% wind power that fluctuates all the time then we need to do better than what we do now.

Chris - At the moment, a lot of these smart metering technologies in people's own homes, it's telling them where they're using the power and encouraging them led by price to change their behaviour. But to do what you're saying would involve the power station or the grid itself sending a signal to my house to say, "Right, the grid is under heavy load at the moment. Have you got some systems running that actually, you probably could turn off for 10 minutes or so to give the grid a bit of a rest?" That's a bit different though isn't it?

Guenter - That technology exists. I have one of those meters. I've had it for the last 5 years and I get messages every day when the grid gets strained. Meaning, that translates to a higher price. My phone tells me, now will be a good time to turn something off. Now, that still depends on me then making a decision and actually, actively doing something. So, we want to move away from that.  so for example, if your refrigerator gets turned off for 2 minutes, you won't notice the difference whatsoever. The food will still be cold. So, what we want to do is we want to get to a situation where it's fully automated and your appliances do this all in the background without you, even have to worry about it.

Chris - It is not a problem with that though that if the grid goes under load, lots of things turn themselves off all at once and altogether in synchrony and then you get a huge surge and everything goes, "Ooh! There's a big surfeit of power!" Everything turns itself back on again and the whole grid goes to these horrible cycles of boom and bust which ultimately puts enormous load on the technology.

Guenter - Good point. The Germans have realised this with the solar PV panels where all the solar PVs, small scale intallations, all on people's rooftops had a controlled signal built-in that said, if the grid is strained to a certain point, at that point, turn it off. And if you had a million of those and if that were to happen, a million of them turning off at the same time, the grid would collapse. It couldn't handle that because this would happen within a fraction of a second. So, one research area clearly is to develop control theories and control algorithms and underlying technology to move to something where we have not just one controller but we have millions of them. They talk to each other. They're sensitive to what the others are doing. Then we can avoid these problems.

Chris - Have we got a grid to practice on?

Guenter - You don't want to do these experiments on a large scale. So, we build these, we test them in the laboratory and then we try to validate them on a computer too. Eventually, we'll move them out to small scale real grids. And so, right now, we don't do this but you can envision that we work with the Argonne on-site grid. You usually don't experiment with a real system that has millions of customers on it until you're really, really sure the thing works the way it's designed to.

Chris - And how far do you think we are from that dream?

Guenter - We sort of have a 5 to 10-year outlook so that we develop the tools, the control tools, the modelling tools in the first 5 and then in the second 5-year period, that we actually would deploy them and roll them out and test them.

Chris - Do you envisage any problems with retrofitting this into people's homes? Is that going to be a huge cost of implementation?

Guenter - One of the criterias that we always include when we make a plan is, clean, reliable, resilient, but also, affordable because that is the key thing. It's key thing to you as a consumer - you and your household as well as to industry.

Moving energy along transmission lines comes at a cost because power is lost along the lines. But those losses are lower if the electricity is transmitted at higher voltages, which is why the current UK National Grid operates at up to 400,000 volts.

Now the Technology company ABB are working on developing even higher voltage systems that could operate at up to a million volts, which they think could transport power further and more efficiently. David Hughes is working on the project.

Chris - Tell us first of all a little bit about the present national grid that we use at the moment. How does it work?

David - Well, the present national grid was developed in the in-between '30s and the '50s. It was typically around large centralised power stations very close to large population centres. But now, what we're seeing is a very different demand, we're seeing with the same tidal, the same wind, the same solar, the same biomass. And also, where the load event as in Scotland, to where the consumers are in England, the power has to be moved between Scotland and England.

Chris - Also, I did some back of the envelope calculations and found that you wouldn't actually need to use more than about a fifth or half of the Sahara Desert and cover it with solar panels. In fact, you could generate enough electricity to meet most of the world's energy demands. But most of the problem comes with getting the energy from the Sahara to where we need it.

David - You are absolutely correct and this has been a big dilemma across the majority of Europe. If you take Europe as an example, you have wind in the north of Europe and you have solar in south of Europe. So, moving solar when the wind doesn't blow up to the northern Europe and moving the wind when the wind does blow, and the sun doesn't shine down to countries like Spain is a different dilemma and a different equation. Obviously, the solutions we have as ABB are being put in place for an integrated European network.

Chris - We'll come back to David Hughes in just a second because first, we need to go to Dave Ansell's garage because we did a neat little experiment this week to explain why actually jacking the voltage up to very high levels can save you quite a lot of energy when it comes to transporting electricity.

Dave - Power stations aren't inside your house so we've got to somehow get that electricity to somewhere where we can use it. The obvious way to do this would be to just transmit it at normal 240 volts like you would do around your house. I've got a little model showing roughly what would happen. What I've got is a power supply which is using 6 volts AC. Its voltage is pushing electricity through some quite long wires to a light bulb which is modelling your washing machine or your lights in your house.

Chris - So, this long wire, that's like the national grid.

Dave - Yeah, in reality, it would be thousands of miles long, but in our case, it's only about a meter. But it's got lots of resistance. It behaves very similarly.

Chris - And the light bulb is barely glowing.

Dave - This is because as you push current through a wire, you lose lots of energy and the more the current is, the more energy you lose. And so, very, very little of that energy is ending up in the light bulb so it's very, very dim.

Chris - Because we've turned most of the energy into heat effectively in the national grid, the transmission wires, before it got anywhere near the light bulb.

Dave - Indeed.

Chris - So, the power stations, if they transmitted electricity at main's voltage, this would be happening. The lights in the houses would be dim and the transmission lines would actually lose most of the energy on the way to the houses.

Dave - That's right. So, to get around this, the power companies use a fundamental piece of physics and this is the amount of power. So the amount of energy you're using per second is the current times of voltage. So, how much basically is flowing times how hard you're pushing it. So, you can transmit the same amount of power either at a low voltage and a high current or at a very, very high voltage in a very low current. Because all the energy lost is actually with the current, the higher the voltage, the lower the losses. So hopefully, the more power gets to your house.

Chris - So, if we were to step up the 6 volts of AC that you're power station is pushing into our national grid and then step it down again to 6 volts of the other end of your miniature national grid, we should lose less energy in the transmission lines because the current is lower. That means the light bulb should be correspondingly brighter.

Dave - That's right. To do that, what I've got is two devices called transformers.  This one will convert that 6 volts up to about 45 volts. And so, this will increase the voltage by a factor of 8 and I've got another one which will drop it down again back to 6 volts hopefully.

Chris - So, we're going to put one of these transformers close to our power station - our 6-volt supply and this is going to step the voltage up and therefore, the current will go down to keep the power the same. At the other end of our transmission lines, we're going to put a second transformer which is going to step the voltage back down and therefore, the current back up but only in a short supply line into the lamp. So, we should see the light lighting up brighter.

Dave - So, it should be much less energy lost in the national grid and the light should work a lot better.

Chris - Okay, so let's wire this up then. So, you got them on a chalk block for ease of connection and this should give us between 40 and 50 volts out of the 6 volts supply.

Dave - That's the idea.!

Chris - So now, we're on to the second transformer. So, this is the step down again at the other end of our transmission lines. This is going to return the voltage the 6 volts hopefully that we began with and at a proportionally high current.  Woow! Now that's quite a stunning difference. I'd say that's a good 5 times brighter.

Dave - That sounds about right. There's far, far less energy getting lost because we're forcing much less current through the wires. And so, everything is much more efficient and our light bulbs work much better.

Chris - If I were to measure the temperature in the wires, would I therefore see that it was getting less hot with this setup because it's losing less energy as heat?

Dave - Yup and this means that the national grid loses probably less than 5% of its energy to transmission like this.

Chris - Thank you very much to Dave Ansell. We'll put the pictures of our little experiment on our website nakedscientists.com as well so you can take a look at the difference the transmitting at high voltage achieved. So David Hughes, that's the physics behind why you want to transmit energy at high voltages. The difference between our system and our experiment and what you're proposing is you're going to use DC - direct current - rather than alternating current - AC - why is that?

David - The reason why we use DC again is purely down to the losses as you heard in the previous piece. Basically, when you're moving HVDC over several thousand kilometres...

Chris - That's high voltage DC.

David - It's high voltage DC, that the percentage of power loss is around 3%.  When you compare that to AC, the power that we lose is between 30 and 40%. So, it makes good economic and commercial sense to go for HVDC.

Chris - The good thing about AC as we demonstrated is that you can very easily convert electricity from one voltage to another using a transformer because you have this changing field in your transformer because you've got a changing current. If you use direct current, how do you step the voltage up and down like we do with AC? Are you going to have to run it through some kind of inverter like the people who have solar cells on their roof?

David - Yes. In theory, you're quite correct. What we do is the current in voltage is transformed over DC and then we have large converter situations where we convert back to AC. So historically, when you're moving large currents, you have problems interfacing with the frequency. With DC, it is very, very simple and you just convert straight back to AC.