I recently had lunch with Dr. David Lubkeman, Research Professor and Instructor at North Carolina State University and the FREEDM. The FREEDM Systems Center, which is the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery Systems and Management Center, is funded by multiple parties, including the National Science Foundation and industry sponsors. NC State has a long tradition in electric power systems engineering, with many of today’s power engineers having used the classic textbook Elements of Power System Analysis, authored by the late Dr. William Stevenson of NC State, and later updated by Dr. John Grainger at NC State. I was fortunate to have worked with Drs. Stevenson, Grainger, and Lubkeman during my graduate studies at NC State, and it is great to see Dave as part of the successful FREEDM Systems Center project - http://www.freedm.ncsu.edu/
The FREEDM center was started in 2008, with an $18.5 million dollar grant from the NSF. The FREEDM’s center has multiple goals that include the performance of fundamental breakthrough technology in energy storage and power semiconductor devices, developing enabling technologies for subsystem and system demonstrations, and developing a one-megawatt FREEDM green energy hub system to power the Engineering Research Center’s headquarters and other buildings on NC State's Centennial Campus
The FREEDM Center has multiple university partners, including Arizona State University, Florida State University, Florida A&M, and Missouri Science and Technology University. It also includes universities in Germany, Switzerland, and New Zealand. ABB, parent company of my employer Ventyx, is an industry partner with the FREEDM Center.
Among the many FREEDM projects and graduate student projects that Dave showed me was the prototype of a power electronic distribution transformer that was being designed and assembled. Most of the hundreds of millions of distributions transformers in service around the world today are constructed with components such as iron cores, paper insulation, and mineral oil. The power electronic distribution transformer would replace all these components with solid-state semi-conductors. Maybe even more interesting, the FREEDM system is working on a distribution transformer that not only converts medium-voltage to the low-voltage ac power that is universal on electric utility secondary systems today, but it would also have a low-voltage DC bus. This would permit the increasing amounts of dc loads that are present today, such as computing equipment power supplies, renewable energy sources such as solar, and energy storage devices to plug directly into a DC bus, eliminating their need for their own ac-to-dc power converters. (On a separate note: ABB, which has long been the leader in DC power applications, including high-voltage DC (HVDC) for power transmission, is now providing DC data center solutions, which offer the advantages of higher efficiencies, less space, and reduces equipment and installation costs. http://www.abb.com/cawp/seitp202/187b2f29acaea090c1257a0e0029fb1a.aspx)
The “War of the Currents” was declared by many to be over in the 1890’s, when the ac technology systems supported by Westinghouse and Tesla proved superior to Edison’s dc technology systems. Low-voltage dc technology may be able to borrow from Mark Twain, who said “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
For electric distribution engineers such as myself, it is wonderful to see such innovative R&D being performed on the electric power distribution system, as the FREEDM center is doing.
