Electricity and Control September 2024

ENGINEERING THE FUTURE

The core innovation at VEIR is the cooling system, which is passively cooled with nitrogen.

Heidel and others at Breakthrough Energy Ventures became aware of the innovation in 2019 while researching transmission. Today VEIR’s system is passively cooled with nitrogen, which runs through a vacuum-insulated pipe that surrounds a superconducting cable. Heat exchange units are also used on some transmission towers. Heidel says transmission lines designed to carry that much power are typically far bigger than VEIR’s design, and other attempts at shrinking the footprint of high-power lines were limited to short distances underground. “High power requires high voltage, and high voltage re quires tall towers and wide rights of way. Those tall towers and wide rights of way are deeply unpopular,” Heidel says. “That is a universal truth around much of the world.” Moving power around the world VEIR’s first alternating current (ac) overhead product line can provide transmission capacities up to 400 MW and voltages of up to 69 kV, and the company plans to scale to higher voltage and higher-power products in the future, including direct current (dc) lines. VEIR will sell its equipment to the companies installing transmission lines, with a primary focus on the US market. Looking ahead, Heidel believes VEIR’s technology is need ed as soon as possible to meet rising electricity demand and new renewable energy projects around the globe.

After leaving MIT, Heidel worked at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and then at Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) investment firm, where he continued studying transmission. “Almost every decarbonisation scenario and study that’s been published in the past two decades concludes that to achieve aggressive greenhouse gas emissions reduc tions, we’re going to have to double or triple the scale of power grids around the world,” Heidel says. “But when we looked at the data on how fast grids were being expanded, the ease with which transmission lines could be built, the cost of building new transmission, almost every indicator was heading in the wrong direction. Transmission is getting more expensive over time and taking longer to build. We need to find a new solution.” Unlike traditional transmission lines made from steel and aluminium, VEIR’s transmission lines leverage dec ades of progress in the development of high-temperature superconducting tapes and other materials. Some of that progress has been driven by the nuclear fusion industry, which incorporates superconducting materials into some of its nuclear reactor designs. But the core innovation at VEIR is the cooling system. VEIR co-founder and advisor Steve Ashworth developed the rough idea for the cooling system more than 15 years ago at Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of a larger Department of Energy-funded research project. When the project was shut down, the idea was largely forgotten.

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SEPTEMBER 2024 Electricity + Control

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