Interview with Ken Dulaney, FREEDM systems Center
Ken Dulaney, Director of Industry and Innovation at the FREEDM Center
Our chair of graduate affairs Zachary Lucy from NC state student energy club interviewed Ken Dulaney, Director of Industry and Innovation at the FREEDM Center. You can also click on the link to see the full interview on YouTube.
Can you tell us a little bit about you and your journey in the energy field?
If we go way back, I’ve always been interested in environmental issues and energy since college. In my undergrad, I chose mechanical engineering, partially because of the energy focus, but even before that, in high school I had an interest in environmental issues, and realized that energy was going to be the field that I eventually wanted to wind up. After my first job at an environmental agency in South Carolina, I decided to go to graduate school, and specifically picked a graduate school, and I specifically picked a graduate school based on their emphasis within electric vehicles. I did not do research at the University of Texas for my Master’s degree on electric vehicles writ large, but on a very particular application using flywheel energy storage for electric buses, for example. And even in that, I was even more narrowly focused. I was looking at the containment system – you have to put that spinning mass in a box, so in case you do have a failure you’re able to contain the energy. I decided to move to the research triangle region, because of the proliferation of engineering opportunities that were here, and of course the universities that help with that. And I joined a non-profit that was focused on energy efficiency, worked there for a decade and really enjoyed it. And because of the connections I had there, it enabled me to come into this role at NC State, which I really do enjoy.
Can you tell us a little about your role as Director of Industry and Innovation at the FREEDM Center?
Sure, it’s a big fancy title, and there’s a lot of mundane parts that go into that. FREEDM as a center has industry members that are sponsors of some of the research that we work on. They pay a fee, belong to the center, and then receive benefits for that. And those benefits include access to research, the ability to collaborate in a research environment - sometimes with some of their competitors – but then also access to talent, which is our name for students. They love our graduates, which is the primary reason for some of our members to be affiliated with the Center. So I help to manage some of those relationships, I help to handle some of our marketing activities, I get to order the shirts and the pens and the coffee mugs and that kind of stuff. So dealing with those relationships and representing the Center is one half of the job. The other piece is I help move some of those inventions that we create with those research dollars, to move those to commercialization. So that includes forming start-ups, working with the NC State Office of Research and Commercialization, patent protection, and that’s another really interesting piece of this role. As a part of it too, I also give career advice to students, whether its reviewing linked in profiles or helping them make connections to internships and companies that they’re interested in. So I do a lot of different things. But all of it is still helping to push the research that the faculty and the students perform to really move ahead in this energy space to allow for more renewables, help electric vehicles be more efficient, all that great stuff. So it’s a really rewarding role.
What research currently going on at the FREEDM Center are you most excited about?
Well that’s like asking me who’s my favorite kid. You can’t really say that. But I do have several projects that I’m more actively involved in than some of the other research projects. Like I said, it’s everything from power systems to power electronics to materials research on the little tiny switching MOSFETS that we use on some of the power electronics. But there’s one project, an open source communications platform that has applications for microgrids. And it’s got an acronym that only an academic could love, it’s the Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart-Grids (RIAPS). And I’ve been spending a lot of time working with other open source organizations, and promoting that to help see that open source platform move to commercialization. Working on pilot projects and things like that. So RIAPS takes up a good bit of my time, and is a really exciting opportunity, because it’s one of those things that has the potential to really change the industry and scale greatly. On the electric vehicles side, one of the projects that we’ve worked on [a DC fast charger] that didn’t get a whole lot of press because it wasn’t a breakthrough technology - it wasn’t the first DC fast charger to use silicone-carbide devices. And it’s not the biggest that we’ve built so far. But it’s a small DC fast charger that, I think again will serve a market niche for electric vehicle charging because it’s so compact. I mean this thing is yay big and weighs maybe 50 pounds. That’s one of the things that FREEDM does, right? We take the magic of this new breed of power semi-conductors, and we can pack more power into a smaller box, to put it in layman’s terms. So I’m amazed that we can do that and excited about some of the commercial attention for that. And then some of the work that went into that is also applicable to one of our core technologies called a solid state transformer. And we just keep building new generations of that and finding ways to increase the voltages where it works, and increase the capabilities and the software that surrounds it to make that another one of those game-changer technologies. I think that’s a bit of a longer-term time-horizon than that small DC fast charger, but those are three of the projects that I’m most interested in and excited about.
We touched on this a bit, but could you expand on what FREEDM Center has going on in the renewable energy space?
Sure, as I like to explain to people, we don’t make solar panels. We make it easier to connect solar panels to the grid. We don’t make electric vehicles, but we make better, more efficient motors, we help with battery management algorithms, and we already mentioned some of the charger applications. We’re working on a large research project right now, funded by the Department of Energy’s Solar Technology Office. And the goal is to build, essentially, a comprehensive modeling system for the electric grid, so that when there is a disruption, an outage, or say in North Carolina we happen to get hit by a hurricane – so when the grid goes down because of a hurricane the only method right now that the utilities use to restart is to power up the large generating assets like coal or nuclear, and then they allow solar to come on. One of the impacts of this modeling system is it will enable those renewable energy resources to come back on faster, but more than that it’s also going to be applicable so that all the solar farms and other renewable energy resources will play a bigger role in being able to support the grid, both for normal operations as well as abnormal.
What trends do you see in corporate investment and application of renewable energy, say in the coming decade?
Well, you see a lot more corporate responsibility. Companies are saying by this year we’re going to be carbon neutral. The tech companies are great examples. I mean google has a promise, by 2030, to be all renewable. Facebook has a similar promise. Amazon helped to provide that guaranteed customer base for the onshore wind farm here in North Carolina. Almost all of the power coming from Desert Wind goes to Dominion territory, which Amazon purchases for their data centers. So there’s those sorts of trends. The other trends you see are that financial firms are essentially telling their investors, and telling companies that they invest in, we are moving away from fossil fuels. We believe that fossil fuels have a limited lifetime, and greater risk in the future, and your value as an investment is now downgraded because you remain in that particular space. You see that with divesture in investments in coal mining, divesture in utilities that are not acknowledging this shift to renewables. The same thing is happening to the oil companies as well. The companies that are making that move to renewable energy are seeing greater returns than the companies that are not making that move, and insisting that they’re just going to keep on doing what they’ve been doing and keep on trying to defend a non-tenable position.
How close is FREEDM Center to completing the Green Energy Smart Grid?
Did we do what we said we were going to do, right? You’ve got to go back a little bit for that story. So, FREEDM was founded in 2008 with a large grant from the National Science Foundation to form what’s called the Engineering Research Center. The goal of these Engineering Research Centers - and they have them across the country at different universities – was specifically to address grand challenges, whether that’s a grand challenge in health care, earthquake structures, better weather prediction, and things of that nature. Our grand challenge was, how to modernize the distribution grid. It’s a 10 year funding program, and overtime we took a systems approach. What are the things we have to do at the systems level to make this work? OK, that’s great we have the system idea. Now there are enabling technologies that have to support that system approach. In order to build those enabling technologies, you may need some really fundamental research to make that happen. Over 10 years, we achieved maybe 90-95% of that overall vision. We’ve made strategic advances in the development of wide-gap semi-conductors (silicone carbide, gallium nitride). Those semi-conductors then fed into the capabilities of the solid-state transformer that I mentioned earlier, which is one of the building blocks for the green energy smart grid that you described. It represents the hardware side in order to enable more microgrids, in order to enable the simple connection of more distributed energy resources, all the things that are enabled at that system vision level. So, about 90%. We’ve done the full hardware demonstration in our lab where we’ve got the software, we’ve got the hardware, and it all works in the lab environment. A start-up company was formed after licensing some of the products that FREEDM Center developed. They got some grants, started building prototypes, started selling the product – the name of the company by the way is GridBridge, and they were purchased a few years ago by a traditional transformer manufacturer. From our standpoint, that’s a home run. Where you go from research, to license, to start-up, to acquisition by a major player in that particular space. So, it takes a while, but the research that FREEDM has done will have an impact – it is having an impact currently – but it will have an even greater impact as time goes on. Like if you throw a pebble in a pond and the waves keep going out, that’s what we’ve done.
How does the center bridge the gap between fundamental academic research which caN be more narrow in its focus and real challenges faced by the industry?
Building on what I explained earlier, all research universities have what’s called a three plane diagram that explain that connection between a system level approach, the technologies you need to achieve that system vision, and then some of the fundamental research to feed into building those technologies. Beyond that, it’s great to build stuff in the lab, but there’s a big challenge in getting it from that fundamental level to where industry is going to take it and use it. The other piece of the ERC program is that they are required to have industry members. My role is to help build those industry relationships. That participation by companies like ABB, which has a large corporate presence on centennial campus, Duke Energy, the largest utility in the United States and serves North Carolina as well. Companies like New York Power Authority, Eaton, Schneider, SAS, that span that value chain all the way from companies that supply materials that allow you to build the power electronics, to companies that are going to apply those power electronics, and sell those devices to their customers who may be the electric utilities. That participation of industry is one of those things that help to keep us focused on not just building some cool gadget. We’re really looking for that technology to have application in the real world. And that’s the value of having an industry program affiliated with a research center like FREEDM.
What opportunities are there for undergrads and graduate students to get involved with the FREEDM Center?
So, there are several. For graduate students – and of course don’t tell the faculty this, but the graduate students are the ones that do all the work – there are research associate opportunities, so you can be an RA. And the key there is to find a faculty member that’s doing research in an area that aligns with your particular interests. At FREEDM, and it varies from semester to semester, we have from 80-100 graduate students predominantly from electrical engineering that are affiliated with the Center. Sometimes we’ll have students from civil engineering, or materials, or mechanical that are engaged, but most of them are electrical engineering because of the nature of our work. So the majority of our graduates, masters, and Phd come from that cohort of research associates. But we do have opportunities for undergrads. If you’ve heard of the Research Experience for Undergraduates – it’s a REU program where Centers like FREEDM get funding from the National Science Foundation, and that allows us to hire REUs for the Summer. Way back, I was an REU at Georgia Tech in Physics. So just to say, if you become an REU look what can happen to you. But the REU experience really is a great opportunity for undergraduates to experience what it’s like to go to graduate school, or what it’s like to do research in a university lab. We continue to have REUs come to FREEDM, basically that spend their Summer doing research with us under the direction of graduate students. We also have an opportunity for what we call Undergraduate Research Scholars, and this is an opportunity for undergrads to work during the semester. So they’re a full-time student, but they’ve got a job, and that job is for them to work in our lab and do a similar sort of thing, but it’s not nearly as intensive as the REU Summer Program. So yes, there are opportunities, much more so for graduate students, but we do typically have a few slots both during the semester and during the Summer for undergraduates as well.