A Norwegian company named after a mythical Norse god is helping power lines transmit as smoothly and evenly as possible with the help of a small magic sphere the size of a soccer ball.
Heimdall Power is bringing its technology—which is already a hit across Europe—to North America, with a first stop in Minnesota and Michigan.
Power lines today, explains Michelle Lewis writing at Electrek, are mostly ‘dumb’ which is to say that there is no information about how much more electricity is being delivered than is needed, or how much less. No real-time information exists about how they are operating at all in most cases.
For a country like the United States of America where there can be found 160,000 miles of power lines, the untapped potential is enormous.
Installed in a few minutes by a drone, Heimdall’s flagship product, a spherical sensor that mounts on high voltage power lines and is called the Neuron, monitors the voltage, temperature, and angle of electrical currents in the lines in real-time, transmitting that information back to grid managers who may, for example, see that there is an enormous over-transmission in one part of the grid that could either be tamped down to save money for the consumers, or reallocated to another part of the grid where demand is higher.
The Neuron was pioneered with the Norwegian utility Arva, which now uses them extensively through its grid portion.
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“Both Arva and other grid companies are going to build out the power grid, to double the capacity we have today over the next ten years,” says Trond Are Bjørnvold, department manager at Arva, in a statement. “The investments will be enormous, but we should not invest more than necessary. We should also strive to prioritize the development in the correct order.”
With the Neurons: “We now know exactly how much spare capacity that is available in the line, and how much power we could potentially send through the network,” Bjørnvold added
Heimdall claimed in a statement that better control over the lines has saved customers hundreds of millions of Norwegian Kroner, or almost $10 million.
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To further increase the accuracy of the Neuron, Heimdall has partnered with the Switzerland-based Meteometrics, which added machine learning data and computational software on weather conditions. This finished product is now coming to the US on the back of deals with Great River Energy in Minnesota, and another, unnamed, publically-traded utility in Michigan.
“By combining our weather insights with Heimdall Power, we’re offering companies a look into their real-time power line capacities—something that a majority of energy grid companies have not had access to before,” said Paul Walsh, CEO of Meteomatics North America. “We’re looking forward to continuing our work together stateside.”
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