Battery Technology and DC Architecture: A Discussion with John Springer of Dynapower

The transcription of the video is below.

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Kerim: Hi everyone, this is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. Today, I have with me John Springer of Dynapower. John is the Segment Manager of E-Mobility, among other things, at Dynapower.

John Springer’s Background and Early Career

And today we’re going to talk about a lot of things, but mostly technologies around DC-coupled architectures. But before we dive in there, John, I would like to ask you a little bit about your background and how your career has evolved, or even go back further than that, if you wish.

As a person, I’d love to get to know you and how you found yourself doing the things you are in the world and ended up at Dynapower, what you’re doing now.

John: Absolutely. Kerim, thank you so much for having me on SolarAcademy. I definitely appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and to talk about some of the developments that are going to be industry-changing, moving forward.

My background, as a kid, was always super interested in electronics. I don’t know how many people on this call would remember a Radio Shack, but I liked purchasing build your own radios. I would build motors out of basically instructions out of books I found. I would figure out how to make anything battery-operated that I potentially could, whether the voltages matched, didn’t match, ran on 9 volts. It was an interesting experience.

I should have probably stuck more to the engineering side of things, but also found I was really strong at business development. When you’re younger and your pocketbook fills up, it’s a little bit harder to make that decision between, do I pursue more like an academic engineering side of things, or do I spray off and see what sort of cash you can make?

Transition to Battery Technology

I had a lot of business development roles, director of sales for companies doing storage media, imaging supplies, and through one of the places where I was a director, one of the products that we offered was laptop batteries.

Kerim: Laptop batteries are obviously one of the first important uses of batteries in the consumer world.

John: At first it started off really just kind of distributing those batteries. But I was given an opportunity. There was a hard problem from one of the large HP VARs, NWN, and they were looking for economic solutions for laptop batteries for school districts, and they came to us knowing that like distributed the technology, but it needed an extended life battery that was a realistic cost and something that could be brought to market very quickly to be able to satisfy school districts’ demands.

It really got into more product development, design development opportunity to build that battery, built the battery, sold quite a few of them. It was interesting. One day, I got a call out of the blue from HP. I thought for sure this was going to be a phone call about IP infringement and going to prison or suing me out of existence.

But interestingly, they had seen the product and were so satisfied with the build quality. They explained to me that they had a problem. They were releasing to all of the school districts a laptop. It was a Revolve. It was one of the first two in one. They realized after they built it that the battery didn’t last for a school day. 

They needed to come up with a really quickly extended life solution for a battery that they were going to roll out.

Went through a development activity and sold lots of aftermarket batteries to be able to support that initiative. That’s probably where I got a lot of interest in battery technology.

Then that company, unfortunately, got sold to private equity. And you know how sometimes those transactions go not so particularly positive and went to work for — I wanted to stay in the battery industry. I went to work for PowerSonic, who’s one of the large international manufacturers, lead acid batteries, lithium batteries, and was tasked with putting together their direct sales efforts.

After really successfully putting together a very solid sales team, I was invited to participate in spinning up a business unit out of the existing company to integrate stationary storage, energy storage with EV charging applications to be able to stretch the grid at those points of distribution congestion.

Kerim: Big batteries. We’re talking about utility scale applications.

John: 20-40 foot solutions to really be able to maximize on that. And then was pretty effective at doing a number of installations, some of the tier ones, big names. It was a positive experience.

Joining Dynapower and Company Overview

But Dynapower had reached out to me and I was highly interested in it because Dynapower is a manufacturer. Instead of just taking existing technologies, white-labeling or not really developing it, the opportunity to participate in the actual technology itself, like doing the laptop batteries, was highly attractive to me. I went to work putting, defining the E-Mobility strategy.

Kerim: Tell us a little bit about the one paragraph intro on Dynapower, here maybe, would be appropriate. What’s Dynapower’s history? What about that way of organizing a company? It seemed to appeal to you and also what you’re working on right now. How do they all tie together?

John: Dynapower legacy company, over 60 years of domestic U.S. experience in power conversion technology and really developing and solving a lot of the world’s hard problems, not just in the clean energy space where I participate with EV chargers, microgrids, renewables, and solar.

But a large part of the business is also the development of power electronics and conversion solutions for government, military applications, high power applications, and industrial applications. Really having that depth of engineering resources, that type of skill set and knowledge was really appealing.

It’s not like working for a company that produces a product or has a small portfolio of items that they sell, but really has the ability to lead the market in terms of product development and honestly, just making the technology.

Kerim: Right. Dynapower is not so much of a product company as much as it is a solutions company. Is that the right way to describe it? I don’t know if I am doing it justice.

John: No, no. I mean, it’s twofold, to be able to scale and to be able to also be provide the products at scale that companies need in certain senses for — I work with a lot of integrators, OEMs, and they need standardized products to be able to incorporate into energy storage systems, into charging technologies. In that sense, it is products on that side of it. But then on the other side, it’s those development activities and project-based solutions.

A unique one that we participated in that would maybe give us a sense of scale is we provided all of the power electronics for the ACES project, which is the very large hydrogen electrolysis project in Utah. It’s several hundred megawatts of power electronics. When you think of it, these things are one-offs.

They’re the size of an apartment. I mean, it is ridiculous power to be able to work on that, and we can build anything from those smaller inverters, 125 kilowatts on up to things that are thousands of volts and tens of thousands of amps. It’s ridiculous.

When you see bus bars, sometimes, you measure them in millimeters and centimeters. Some of the stuff we make, you can measure in feet. It’s wild how large some of the products are.

Kerim: So wide-ranging solutions, obviously, in this power conversion space. 

E-Mobility and Smart Infrastructure

Now you are charged with leading the E-Mobility business segment in Dynapower.

John: Actually, the way that we’ve now approached it and we’ll rebrand it and launch it next year is I’ll lead the department as a smart infrastructure. There’s so much bleed over between the microgrid world and the EV charging world and the energy storage and generation assets that it really makes sense to be able to provide a solution set rather than just a component, like a commodity.

Kerim: Makes sense. I mean, related to that, obviously, you could technically run a home from an EV and that’s a microgrid on its own if it’s got the —

John: For days per week.  

Kerim: With the solar panels on the roof, you could take all the electrons, put it in your car battery, run the home from the car in the evening and use the car and produce more electrons the next day, and do the same thing again, technically speaking.

But those dots are not yet fully connected, obviously, in the marketplace. I have no doubt it’s going to happen. That is your world.

Tell us a little bit about some of the exciting things that are happening in that.

Challenges in EV Charging and Microgrids

John: In that instance, what people might find interesting and I think it would end up being like a challenge here at some point is the idea of home charging is so convenient that if you had a gas station built into your garage, you would always use it. You would never actually go to the gas station.

That works 1 out of every 20 or 30 people on your block has an EV. But I think you’re going to start to face some challenges when 1 out of every 2, 1 out of every 3 people because when they sized the distribution for your neighborhood, they didn’t think everyone was going to have a 7, 8 kilowatts additional load to it. It’s going to be an upgrade problem, in that instance.

But there are so many different things to talk about, and there are other companies, too, that are really going down this DC microgrid for residential neighborhoods.

Some of those examples would be like Emerge Alliance, which is a nonprofit working in that direction. Block Energy, who aggregates all of the solar assets on the rooftops, has larger stationary storage to be able to support the neighborhood, and then just has inverters at each one of the houses to be able to provide the power for the electronics within the house, which are AC. Things with compressors and motors are oftentimes AC, but what I don’t think most people recognize is a lot of the stuff in your house is DC. Your TV is natively DC, your computers, too. It doesn’t have to order it.

Kerim: Right. It’s an unnecessary conversion from neighborhood power coming in DC, you convert it to AC, to run these appliances, which by default, could have run on DC, anyway, is what you’re saying.

John: Exactly.

Kerim: We briefly talked about in a previous conversation the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts, running on DC a hundred years ago. And so I guess we might be seeing those types of communities pop up.

But obviously, as moving towards that, what are some of the standards we need to bring to the market to enable that kind of a more efficient power and energy distribution in a consumption world?

Standardization and Industry Collaboration

John: It really does come down to in terms of standardization and communication and everyone arriving at the same page or coming up with the same set of rules that everyone agrees to play by.

So much of the EV charging world and some of these microgrids are proof of concept, one-off. It’s the wild west out there, deciding on what an appropriate bus voltage is in certain applications.

Again, it’s not always necessarily defined in the NEC very clearly, especially as it relates to DC. Working with like standard organizations like the CurrentOS Foundation, UL, Schneider, ABB, to really help to shape that, and then to be able to make it so the DC assets that are all on this, all communicate with each other.

No consumer wants to be pigeon-holed into a really specific product or application that they can’t scale or if there’s risk of that company going out of business. There has to be some sort of an alignment on how we communicate and what those standards really look like.

Kerim: The giants of the electrical industry, Schneider, ABB, you named maybe a couple other names. You guys are working, is this an open source, nonprofit organization, CurrentOS?

John: It is. It’s an open source, nonprofit.

Kerim: The CurrentOS Foundation, to determine the standards that will essentially be used for a new world really.

John: And it’s everything from the little teeny DC components all the way up to the large scale. There’s got to be some way of everything playing nice in the sandbox as it were, and having that level of definition and safety standard.

Kerim: There must be so many different elements to making this happen or work. What are some of the key obstacles or stumbling blocks and bottlenecks in your view that need to be tackled so that we get to this more efficient world?

John: In my opinion, I think one of them would have to do with some of the protections. AC has a tendency to — like if a circuit breaker goes off the AC just stops. But the DC doesn’t have that zero volt cross so it arcs, and having those arc flash situations poses a risk in terms of safety, potentially. Nobody really wants a bunch of fused disconnects and some of those types of solutions.

Where some of it’s going to come from and I think it’ll become far less expensive in the future, is some of the more silicon-based solutions for solid state relays, circuit breakers. Then those have the added advantage too of really being like smart devices. It’s a smart panel at your house.

It’s not just on or off. It understands what current is going through it. It’s able to limit it. The utility is able to take a look at it. In everyone’s house, everything can communicate in a smart grid situation.

Kerim: I know very little about this topic, but I’ve overheard things like from the wave of that length that that appliance is drawing, you can tell which appliance unit is drawing how much power in your home. And you can tell, “Okay so the refrigerator used this much and the microwave used this much and the washer/dryer used this much” in analysis.

Will this be able to be done in the DC world as well with the same amount of ease?

John: Yeah, because it’s really just it’s limiting the current. As long as it understands the current, it almost allows you to oversize your house or your panel to the extent that it can mitigate how much power the individual residents might be drawing. It knows that in this neighborhood you can’t turn on your EV charger, dryer, refrigerator, and everything all at once.

It allows for a more staggered approach for how the energy is being utilized at a house which is going to help offset some of the infrastructure problems that we’re going to face. It can’t just all be solved by bringing in the max amount of power to each individual location. It has to be solved with a variety of solutions, and some of those are smart charging solutions and AI solutions.

Kerim: Right. If you were to take a guess of how this is going to look like in the future, what would you say?

Future of Energy Solutions and Final Thoughts

John: Oh, gosh. I can’t even look past two months from now with that. I’m not really sure how it’s going to play out.

But there’s going to be a lot of solutions and I think when the US looks at it critically, we have to take a look at things such as the existing grid is 70% of that grid is 25 years old or older. It’s starting to meet the end of life. You’re looking at an increase in consumption in the US of 10% probably by 2028, and that doesn’t necessarily mean you have power at the right places.

Kerim: Right.

John: That’s just the overall consumption and then a tripling of power in the next couple of decades. The government wants to throw a billion here, three billion here, at a problem that’s going to cost two trillion dollars.

I mean, for any politician to say, “Hey, we need we need two trillion dollars”, it’s a political suicide.

Kerim: And especially when panels and batteries are so cheap. This is what drives me nuts. The residential solar market is so inefficient and mainly because of consumers’ ignorance, if you really ask me, because we can really build assets, solar panels. I’ll leave the batteries out, but you can build solar systems for really a buck and a half to two dollars, but most of California is still paying $3-$4, maybe even sometimes over $4 a watt, when Florida is paying $2.25.

The only reason that’s happening is because everybody’s pricing solar’s value just a tad bit under the utility pricing which varies. It’s double in California, and all the value in the middle is being lost between all the middlemen. They’re making fat margins, but the consumer is not benefiting from it, and in the meantime, we’re giving them a really bad product.

And we’re complaining about that it’s going to cost a trillion dollars to upgrade this hundred-year-old system. I think the solution will have to be consumers empowering themselves with solar plus batteries and DC power in their own properties, and they’re going to get a three-year payback on these investments if they do it right and if we design the solutions right, or maybe a five-year payback, but it’s definitely going to be a much better deal than they’re getting now.

I don’t think the grid needs to die. The grid can live in this equation as an exchange medium, but they’re going to have to innovate themselves as well. We’re talking –

John: And that’s why we work so much on the microgrid side of things is being able to because these major corporations, data centers, EV charging stations, they are not waiting for an upgrade.

They take a look at it and then it’s, “Whoa, this is how many years now.”

Kerim: We’ve got to wait two years for a transformer to be shipped and an interconnection permit? No. They’re just going to put the batteries and the panels in their backyard and power their own —  

John: Exactly put the panels and the batteries in the backyard in a residential sense and some of the larger commercial industrial facilities. Just larger systems but really for self-consumption at those locations.

I live in Nevada and if you’re out in the middle of the desert, it’s phenomenal. You could probably buy acres for pennies on the dollar, but if you build that plant, where are you going to push the power to? I mean, the transmission lines are forever away. They’re completely loaded. Really having a more distributed architecture is more efficient, and it’s also safer in terms of redundancy, reliance issues, really ensuring the power is where the power needs to be and that people are protected in terms of if there is a grid outage or disturbance.

Kerim: We talk about a 10% increase in consumption, but there’s a possibility we might have 30% or even 2X by the end of this decade, or in the next 10 years, let’s say.

That can’t all come from the traditional central power. What’s the right word? Central power stations. It has to be built behind the transformer, behind the meter, at the point of consumption, if we’re going to have that much additional capacity.

John: I completely agree and the permitting for it is so much easier, the speed to market is so much faster and after quantifying what your CapEx and OpEx are, you’re safe. You know what you’re paying for power. It’s not this huge variable in the future where you’re subject to wild fluctuations, potential cost increases. You can see the effects of it, and you can get the power that you need today, instead of waiting for power that might not even eventually come.

I’ve worked with some utilities and some clients wanting to put in EV charging infrastructure in certain states, and when they go to the utility the answer is, “We just can’t do it.” It’s not even a question of when. It’s almost like it just gets shut down.

Kerim: Because they don’t have the know-how? Is that why? It’s just too new? Is it different from what they’ve done for the last 50 years?

John: They’re not willing to commit to a time frame. They just can’t say when they would be able to get the power there.

Kerim: Those must be the times when you guys get a call.

John: We get all sorts of phone calls. I get a lot of interesting phone calls. We work with charging depots and developers and people who aren’t going to wait. People who are going to make sure that they can generate on-site the power that they need for these charging depots.

If you take a look at some of these charging depots with 100 stalls of high-power charging, you don’t even necessarily own the adjacent 200 acres so you’re not going to power with that. You’re going to use linear generators.

You might use fuel cells. You might use solar. You might use a limited grid connection. But you’ll use a combination of things to be able to achieve what it is that you need to effectively have the power at that point where it might not be readily available.

Kerim: That is one of the secret sauces of Dynapower. You guys deal with all sorts of different complicated problems, and then you create that solution that glues it all together. Would that be a fair way to describe it?

John: So much of the secret sauce is in the power electronics. How do you take these diverse assets that operate and output on different voltages? Then how do you bring it all together in one cohesive system that allows it to work?

But really helping and going back to some of the previous conversations on some of these standards is arriving at something that’s scalable, something that’s a little bit more standardized, cookie cutter, that really can scale faster. But that’s going to really depend on industry alignment.

Kerim: Even in those cases, I don’t know, maybe a big data center that’s deciding not to wait for the utilities to connect them to power, they design their own behind the meter, behind the transformer solution.

Don’t you still need some approval from the utility or some sort of permitting jurisdiction entity maybe on the construction side?

John: There is permitting, but it isn’t waiting for an interconnection. The interconnection is the thing that really takes it back.

Kerim: You get the construction permitting or the real estate related permitting done, but you don’t need to. Ultimately, that device that you’re powering is still technically connected to the grid. You’re not completely disconnecting it from the grid.

John: Correct. And it’s been overlooked in some instances and other utilities are starting to want to know what you’re doing on the DC side.

Kerim: Right. Because you’re still connecting to some electrical appliance or component, which is also connected to the grid, technically speaking. They do want to know, rightfully so, because it might affect the grid, right?

John: Oh, yeah. And you need to be able to provide assurances that you are not going to push back a bunch of power. You are on the hook for those considerations.

Kerim: Now let me ask you this, though. Can you standardize that type of solution? Okay. Maybe it’s a great thing to do for big data centers or other types of industrial applications, and you sell a hundred of them or a couple of thousands of them.

Great. But can you do that type of design and roll it out across a hundred thousand homes to start with?

John: I know. And that’s one of the big questions.

Kerim: Because that’s what the world needs, right?

John: And I mean, that’s almost like these days sampling the HJs to see who’s going to push back on what things and how standards are interpreted. If it’s a standard, it’s a standard.

It would probably be okay once it’s into the NEC. But in some of these instances, yeah, I mean, it’s variable. Some of these utilities don’t have experience, as you probably have seen, with these types of products and solutions.

They’re kind of at a loss. How many thousands of utilities are in the US? You want to get everyone to get on the same page with all this. That’s interesting to ask.

That’s a big problem with the transmission and distribution upgrades. I don’t know how you’re going to get everyone on the same page. I think there was a transmission line that went through Louisiana.

And Louisiana was partially on the hook for some of the costs involved. But there was no distribution or anything that came off of it. They reaped absolutely zero benefit for something that they had to pay for.

Kerim: Wow. Wow. The utilities have it tough, too. We’ve got to make sure everybody wins in this solution.

Well, it sounds like you guys are working on a whole wide-ranging series of solutions. It’ll be interesting what comes out as the winning DC architecture out of this.

John: With Dynapower and our historic experience and working with some of these emerging and nascent projects, it’s important to be able to take our experience and be able to help others understand that as well in helping to define some of those standards and considerations, and not just like following what somebody else might want to put in place, but really taking some of that experience and knowledge, and helping the industry out to help lead some of that conversation, and help really like, define what some of that should potentially look like and get everyone in the same room.

We can be competitors, but still work together and coming up with what’s best for the environment, what’s best for the consumers, what’s best for the industry, just what’s in everyone’s best interest? And there is that area that is what is in everybody’s best interest.

Kerim: Great. Well, as we’re nearing the end of our conversation, anyI wishes from the universe? If the universe could bring some things your way, what would that be?

John: I’m going to sound like a madman. I want microreactors. I am so sold on the need for –

Kerim: Microreactors like nuclear modular reactors?

John: Yeah, containerized nuclear. I honestly think that that is one of the big —

Kerim: Computerized, obviously, digital. I get that.

John: It’s providing the baseload. It runs 24/7. It can really work on some of those grid inertia problems which are a little difficult to solve in some of these solar and battery projects.

It provides a really compact solution. Again, if we go back to the example of EV charging and not having the 200 acres next door to you, it’d be nice to have a few 20-foot shipping containers that kick out the same power for the next 15 years.

Kerim: Are you seeing applications of that happening? And what would be the cost?

John: What’s interesting, the cost is always throwing me off. I’ve tried to calculate the cost, and it is a wild, unattainable number. It sounds too insane. I need to work on the cost. I can’t go using it in detail.

Kerim: You mean like, it’s too expensive?

John: Yeah, the estimated cost of the reactors is extremely high. Again, I don’t have the hard data to be able to pull from, to be able to fact-check whether or not that’s a real number or not. I’m sure at some point it probably scales and makes sense. But there are solutions that are out there that are mobile, containerized microreactors. It does exist.

Kerim: It does, huh? And they’re being used. Well, obviously, they’re being used in submarines and stuff.

John: Exactly. Maybe the people that do the submarine stuff, they’re working on some other stuff, too.

Kerim: No doubt. I like that idea. I think we need baseload and that’s a very nice clean way of powering that baseload. My only concern with it is that you might bump into the NIMBY problem, “Not in my backyard. Okay, I like the idea. But I don’t want that thing next to my building.”

John: That’s the problem. Exactly.

Kerim: And then the cost is unknown. Whereas, the cost for solar and batteries, solar is 10 times cheaper than it was 15 years ago, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes go down 10%, 20%, 30% every year. Batteries seem to be on a similar trend.

Are we going to be able to have enough batteries, lithium reserves, and all that? That’s a big concern, and maybe there’ll be emerging new technologies. But yeah, no doubt, it’s the early days of this standardized DC architecture feature that might be the new paradigm that we all love to walk into soon.

John: Very true. I don’t wake up and hate my job. It’s very interesting on a day to day basis. It’s great to be able to speak with people like you, other industry leaders, labs, and academia about all of these emerging technologies. It’s a very exciting time to live through this next industrial revolution.

Kerim: Well, great having this conversation with you, John. Thank you for your insights and your know-how that you shared, and we will probably continue doing more of these in the near future.

John: I look forward to it. Thanks again for the invite.

Kerim: Pleasure to have you. Thank you.