Grid Talk DOE|Advanced Grid Research

Two Danish islands will serve as hubs of massive new offshore wind turbines to serve itself and neighboring countries and spur development of clean hydrogen green fuel for aircraft and factories. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Hanne Storm Edlefsen who is the vice president of Energy Islands, a project of the Energinet transmission system operator in Denmark.
One complex will be on Bornholm Island in the Baltic and link up 3,000 megawatts of wind power, simplifying the collection of the power and its transmission to land. The second complex will be on a new island to be built in the North Sea.
“Well out in the North Sea, we’re going to build an artificial island so that’s a whole other project. This is supposed to be finished in 2033 as the plans are now. It will be in the beginning three or four gigawatts of offshore wind which is to be decided by Parliament within the next couple of months, but the ambition is actually that later there will be added even more gigawatts so the artificial island in the North Sea will end on 10 gigawatts which is so much electricity,” said Edlefsen. 
Wind power provides half of Denmark’s electricity, and the goal is to increase it by 80% by 2024.
“It definitely takes some braveness from the politicians to start these projects where a lot of the technology is still new or untested when they are taking the decisions,” she said. 
Hanne Storm Edlefsen has been with Energinet for 11 years. Energinet owns, operates, and develops the transmission grids for Danish electricity and gas supply. Her work focuses on sector coupling and large-scale renewables.
 Edlefsen has a master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen.

Two major fusion initiatives are making headway in the decades long goal to find the ultimate source of clean energy. In this episode of Grid Talk, we visit with Laban Coblentz who is the head of communications at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in the south of France.
Coblentz described the long quest for fusion and its implications. 
“Fusion has the potential to give a baseload source of energy without only a fraction of the waste concerns of fission, without the safety concerns of fission, but with the ability to provide clean energy for a planet in a concentrated way.” 
It will be safe and should not trigger many of the concerns of conventional nuclear reactors that have been around for decades.
“Fusion will not be without waste, but it won’t have any long-lived, high activity radioactive waste.”  
“The fact that the physics don’t allow a meltdown or that kind of thing; you could in fact place it in greater proximity to cities, to industry if you get the local—if you get the regulatory authorities to agree.”
The European Union and the United States are two of the seven key, international players in ITER.
“ITER is not just a fusion device, it’s an exercise in what happens when the global community believes so much in a common goal and in a better future for our kids that we are willing to put aside our known ideological differences to try to pool our best expertise, something that science has done for a longtime.” 
Laban Coblentz has been with ITER since 2015. He is an entrepreneur and consultant with leadership roles at several companies. He has been involved with communication, energy policy, advanced science and technology, and entrepreneurship since attending the U.S. Navy Nuclear Power School in the 1980’s.
He holds an M.A. in English, English Literature from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in  degree in English, Psychology from Malone University.

Fusion power, clean and limitless, long elusive to scientists, may be headed our way sooner than many suspected thanks to a breakthrough experiment in early December at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) in California. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Annie Kritcher, the physicist who designed the successful experiment that recreated the energy source of the sun.
She explained: “What we’re doing here is essentially creating a miniature star in a lab about the size of a human hair to half the size of the human hair. We have 192 giant lasers and when we say giant, that means that the whole system that is used to create this laser energy and all the details associated with it, it’s the size of three football fields when you put all of the 192 laser beams together.”  
Fusion research has been going on for decades, but the December experiment is a significant breakthrough and represents a new approach. 
“The thing that’s different this time is that for the first time we’ve actually demonstrated in the laboratory that we can achieve fusion energy gain in a controlled way. Before that, we’ve never actually generated fusion energy output that was controlled in a laboratory setting. This result motivates and is a proof of principal for all the different approaches out there,” said Kritcher.
That increases the likelihood of success.
“There’s also a huge resurgence in the number of people working in this area and the different approaches that are being looked at and when you have that many people looking at a problem, the progress is highly accelerated.”
Dr. Annie Kritcher is the design lead within the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) team as part of the National Ignition Facility at LLNL. Dr. Kritcher started at LLNL as a summer intern in 2004. 
She earned a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Plasma Physics and a MS Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Annie earned her BS in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan.

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Michael Sachse who is the CEO of Dandelion Energy. Dandelion Energy’s mission is to enable the widespread adoption of geothermal. 
“If you think about what we need to decarbonize, heating’s really a challenge because so much about heating comes from burning natural gas; a lot of homes burn fuel oil, and so really, we got focused on that problem,” said Sachse.
The company offers homeowners affordable geothermal heating & cooling systems as an alternative to gas, oil, propane, or electric heating.
“There’s a strong and growing emotional sense that people want to be sustainable, and they want to make investments that are going to speak to their values.”
Sachse also talks about the cost of installing geothermal heat pumps and how long it takes for a unit to pay for itself.
Michael Sachse is an experienced executive who has previously scaled start-ups through periods of rapid growth. Sachse was previously CEO of Stardog, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NEA, and Chief Marketing Officer at Opower, where he helped to guide the company through its IPO and acquisition by Oracle. Sachse is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School.
Snippet: “Geothermal is a terrific fit for any part of the country that has hot summers and cold winters.”

Kansas City, Missouri is working to place the largest municipal solar farm in the nation next to its $1.5 billion new Kansas City International Airport. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with the Brian Platt who is the City Manager.
“If we ever want to make positive change and progress in these existential and generational challenges that we’re facing, we have to be big and bold,” said Platt. 
The project is adding to Kansas City’s reputation as a leader in reducing carbon emissions and much more.
“We identified 3,100 acres of land that can be used for solar development that can produce up to 500 megawatts of solar panels on that site. We could potentially power 70,000 homes from a solar array in this location which would be about a third of the city.” 
Platt is big on thinking creatively.
“Well, one of the things that we’re thinking about as a city is how we can be better stewards of the environment and improve health and quality of life for our residents. And one of the things you think about of course with air quality and pollution and health outcomes is how do we reduce carbon emissions?”
Brian Platt has been the city Manager since December of 2020. The city manager is responsible for making city services run efficiently and economically. Platt previously served as City Manager for Jersey City, New Jersey. He earned his Master of Public Administration at Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at Emory University.

The federal government is spending $7.5 billion on Electric Vehicle infrastructure to increase EV adoption across the country. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg chats with Nick Voris who is the senior manager of electrification for Evergy.
“It’s going to unlock nationwide travel with respect to EVs,” said Voris.
The money will be spent over the next five years to create electrification corridors.
“The National EV Infrastructure Program… is intent on creating charging sites every 50 miles along our major highway corridors coast-to-coast.” 
“Once we get to the point that we have highway corridor stations every 50 miles, it really reduces or dare I say, eliminates range anxiety because you have so many charging options that do not exist right now so if you can travel Interstate with an EV.” 
Voris believes this one of the most dynamic corners in the utility industry right now.
“I don’t think there’s anything that the utility does that’s sexy, but this is the closest thing.”
Nick Voris leads the Evergy team responsible for developing and implementing electrification products and services, including the utility’s long-term electrification roadmap. He been with Evergy since 2017. He previously worked for Kansas City Power and Light and City Utilities of Springfield, MO.
Voris has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology.