Column
Column
Weinhold’s Power Lines
Brains and Brawn:
The Electronics Revolution
and the Energy System
Michael Weinhold,
Siemens Energy’s
Chief Technology Officer
34 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
the same year, Siemens’ groundbreaking ultra-high volt­
age DC system began pushing 5,000 megawatts across
1,418 kilometers in southern China!
Over 25 years ago, when I was a student of power elec­
tronics and computer architecture, controller boards for
industrial drives were still large and unwieldy. We stu­
dents replaced the software routines of these microcon­
trollers to use them as the “brains” of advanced control
schemes, once again demonstrating how energy engineers
tend to take the best solutions from other domains and
integrate them into their own applications in grids or
power plants. For such components to function under all
conditions requires a lot of domain know-how and re­
dundancy. Systems that use electronics for computing as
well as for “muscle” must be designed to meet high expec­
tations. As any engineer knows, you will not be congratu­
lated for the proper operation of a grid; but failure has
­severe consequences.
Although ICT and most home appliances rely on electron­
ics, most consumers remain unaware of their huge role.
These components are all around us; but since they are
mostly out of sight and inaudible, they remain invisible to
all but experts – whether in industrial applications, Inter­
city trains, wind turbines, or in the grid’s transformers
and storage devices.
I expect that the future will bring even further increased
efficiency in the areas of semiconductor design and con­
verter topologies, where the search is on for new substrates
beyond silicon. Also, we will probably see more DC trans­
mission and distribution in the years to come thanks to
power electronics.
From Michael Weinhold’s notebook: Electronics everywhere – although they are all around us, many consumers remain unaware
of how crucial power electronic components are for the functioning of society – from grid transmission and i­ ndustrial applications
to home appliances.
Illustrations: Elisabeth Moch, Michael Weinhold
What is power? In human interactions, the term often
refers to physical strength, but we also speak of “the
power of information” as a way of shaping and directing
the course of events. Power is the ability to influence the
world in both material and immaterial ways – through
­intelligence and muscles, through brains and brawn. The
same is true for the way in which electronics has reshaped
the energy system.
It was the invention of the transistor and its first commer­
cial usage in the 1950s that kicked off the electronics revolu­
tion. Later, the first integrated circuits and microprocessors
hit the market, setting off a rush to build more powerful
computers using semiconductors. Information and com­
munication technology (ICT) became a fact of life. At the
same time, transistors – used for instance in industrial
drives with thyristors – had reached such a high power
rating that they began replacing mercury-arc tubes in highvoltage direct current (HVDC) systems.
The next breakthrough for HVDC technology was the in­
sulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) for very high volt­
ages and currents in the 1990s. We use these to connect
offshore wind parks to the grid and in medium-voltage in­
dustrial drives. They are the “muscle” in train drive sys­
tems and can be stacked as compact building blocks in
AC/DC terminals. In 2010, the 75-kilometer/400-megawatt
San Francisco Trans Bay Cable link was the first major
HVDC system to use not only IGBTs, but also a new build­
ing block design allowing for a compact AC/DC terminal
footprint. This cutting-edge HVDC topology design was
made possible by the high computing power of modern
microprocessors required for control and supervision. In
In addition to developing control systems, Siemens is
­selectively engaged in the development and manufactur­
ing of semiconductors, such as thyristors for HVDC sys­
tems. And of course we apply these components and con­
trol systems, including those developed by ourselves,
and engage in joint ventures where we see promising
compact or robust technologies. Our size, global presence,
and broad expertise allow us to identify such trends at
an early stage.
The revolution of power electronics allows us to transmit
huge quantities of energy over great distances with high
­efficiency, connecting markets and allowing loads to be
balanced across multiple climatic and time zones. We are
now in the position to build a HVDC supergrid and send re­
newable energy from where it is generated to the industrial
centers. Whether such a supergrid will be built is a political
decision; but thanks to electronics, our technology has both
the brains and the muscle to make it a reality. p
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 35