Scaled Power Solutions 

The problem is the size and the speed of deployment for grid infrastructure. Scaled Power Solutions’ entire technology was built from the ground up to prioritize density and to prioritize how quickly you can deploy this, to address that bottleneck.

 

Even though there are a lot of other power electronics companies out there, and a lot of them say they're focused on the grid, the power electronics value proposition has always been based around functionality — that power electronics can do more than existing grid infrastructure. And it certainly can, for a cost. That's been the crux of the problem for the last 30 or 40 years. Power electronics has been able to outpace existing infrastructure in terms of functionality for four decades, but it's never really had its time in the light because it's too expensive.

 

Our technology was about attacking the more serious problem, which is partially functionality, but the bigger problem is the size and how quickly you can deploy this stuff. Our tech was built from the ground up to address that need.

I started working on this in my PhD at the Center for Power Electronics Systems at Virginia Tech, which is the nation's premier power electronics facility. I worked on a bunch of different topics the first couple of years, and then we landed a pretty sizable Department of Energy award to go after this concept.

 

There was a faculty member here who came up with the idea about 25 years ago, but the power electronics technology wasn't evolved enough to make it worth going after, so it got shelved.

 

Then about five or six years ago, my advisor and I dusted off the concept. The implementation of it was all me, but the fundamental thesis was conceived almost 25 years ago. It took 20 years for the technology to catch up, to get to a point where it was worth exploring. Then we hit it for five years, got a prototype together, and I rolled with it from there.

I've learned a lot of things the hard way — it's usually my de facto way of learning things. I was fortunate that the Center for Power Electronics Systems here at Virginia Tech has always been very industry-grounded in its approach to academic work. CPES has always strived to live somewhere in between companies and academics, believing that the best solutions are grounded in the problems.

 

Despite that effort, early on in my degree I still found myself building solutions without problems, which is what a lot of academics do. They find cool things or cool ideas, they develop cool solutions, and then the job of the university spin-out is to go find a problem for the solution. That happened to me. 

 

What CPES taught me was the importance of identifying the problem first and developing the solution from that. That's where this technology got its legs: taking a step back and not thinking about the power electronic solutions, but focusing on the core of the problem. The problem wasn't that the transformer wasn't intelligent or efficient. The problem is that it took 10 years to install it.

 

How do you leverage the technologies you have to really address the core of the problem? And what does it mean to understand a problem? You can have a very surface-level understanding of a problem, but eventually you can get to the root cause. Having that depth of understanding of the problem is what sets your ability to come up with the right solution.

 

That was a hard-learned lesson that took many years: knowing what it means to understand a problem, and that the best solutions can only come from the deepest possible understanding of the problem.

There has been a disconnect in the way we bring power electronics to the masses and into the grid. There's an expectation of the way this should be done: buy off-the-shelf components, bolt them together in a cabinet, ship it through the same acquisition chains that the utilities use, and install it the same way we install other grid equipment.

 

I think we're due for a shift in the way we think about the value of power electronics, beyond thinking about it in terms of functional improvement. We have to break the mold of power electronics companies being integrators, which is largely what they have been since their inception. We need to vertically integrate power electronics products. If we do that, we can unlock benefits and value far beyond the surface-level functional benefits that have been pushed for the last 30 years. Challenging that paradigm within the power electronics business is what I'm here to do.

I'm still waiting for my future self to gain some wisdom and come back and tell me what the hell's going on. But to my past self, I would have said: raising money is easier than finding customers. Focus on the customer, focus less on the money. If you have a customer, the money's a no-brainer. You could raise money without having a customer, but businesses don't need cash injections like that — they need customers.

 

When you have this core technology, this IP base, and you want to build a company around it, it starts with a customer. It's not as simple as asking the customer, "What's your problem?" Really understanding the customer and their process means deciphering between the way things are and the way people want them to be. Staying grounded in reality with the way things are, and getting that out of your customers so that they share it with you in an authentic and transparent manner, is the name of the game. 

 

To understand the customer, you've got to understand the organization, the chain of command, how decisions are made. Simple decisions like "do we buy this or not" are the surface-level ones. But how is it used? Where is it used? When is it used? How do the bolts get tightened? Who carries it? Do they climb a ladder? Do they use scaffolding?

I've been a part of the power electronics business for about 10 years, but it's existed long before me, and we have a very segmented view of how we build these things. It has limited our ability to revolutionize industries, because of how segmented and siloed the design of these systems is.

 

A product that is designed simultaneously across all these domains will not only revolutionize the industry, it'll unlock a whole world of possibilities. If we can change how we design these systems, there's no telling what we'll be able to build. A product that shows that to the industry will have a serious ripple effect, and the consequences will be far more interesting than just financial.