Stephenson Challenge / Driving the Electric Revolution

Our Technical Partner Dr. Charlie Elliot has been involved in this cross industry initiative for quite some time as it originated in Power Electronics UK. He recently attended a key update meeting in Birmingham. A detailed video giving more details can be found here. Subject to business case and match funding from industry, government has announced that it is prepared to invest up to £78 million in this challenge. This will be managed through Innovate UK and the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund – wave 3.
The challenge is all about developping a UK supply chain for power electronics machines and drives across 7 industrial sectors. All 7 sectors are cruicial if we are to hit our future emmissions targets whilst mainting or exceeding the standard of life we are all used to. We will be keeping a close eye as things develop as this major initiative is something SPS would very much like to be part of and is very well placed both in terms of experience and facilities.

Second V2G Workshop

Our Technical Partner Dr Charlie Elliott attended the second Cenex / Level Vehicle to Grid (V2G) workshop held in Nottingham on 6th February. It was a follow on event from the one in 2018 and it was great to see presentations on the outcome from real world installations abroad and in the UK. As last year there was some healthy debate as to the real world commercial feasibility of V2G in the UK. In other countries certain markets for services have artifically high prices which makes V2G a much simpler proposition.

Courtesy of a £30M Innovate UK funded project there is a lot of activity in this area at the moment which is great to see but also a bit frustrating for a UK based power electronics design and manufacturing company not even contacted to be involved!! One project in particular promises to install up to 1k V2G systems for domestic use. Sadly the core power electronics of this and other systems within the IUK project are being bought in from abroad presumably as there was thought to be insufficient time/budget/knowledge to carry out the development in the UK. Driving down the price of the hardware for V2G is essential to make it commercially viable. SPS is exceptionally well-placed to carry out such work given its existing experience in bidirectional grid-tied inverters and DCDC converters built up over many years. It has also previously worked on DC rapid chargers for EVs. SPS is currently investigating sources of funding / partners for such activity. If you are interested then please do get in contact.