242. HVDC & the Grid of the future - Michael Barnard - Aug26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
With Laurent Segalen from London and Gerard Reid from Berlin, this is Redefining Energy.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
Today on Redefining Energy, we're going to talk about what's called HVDC, High Voltage Direct Current Transmission, which I think is one of those revolutionary technologies in the whole grid hardware space.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:25)
Well, in fact, Gerard, it's not we, it's our friend Michael Barnard. We're taking the week off.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
Yeah, exactly.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:32)
So this is an extraordinary conversation that Michael Barnard had with Cornelis Plet, who is the CTO of Grid Systems Integration at GE Vernova.

**Michael Barnard** (0:43)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:44)
So why don't we listen to the discussion?

**Michael Barnard** (0:53)
Welcome back to Redefining Energy. I'm your host, Michael Barnard. Today, I'm speaking with Case Plet, the CTO of Grid Systems Integration within GE Vernova's electrification business.
Case, welcome back to the discussion.

**Cornelis Plet** (1:07)
Thank you. It's great to be back again, Michael.

**Michael Barnard** (1:09)
Yeah. It's been a couple of years since we last talked, and so people don't necessarily know who you are and what you're up to today.
You're an expert on HVDC and electrification, so why don't you start with the journey that got you to being the CTO in GE Vernova?

**Cornelis Plet** (1:24)
Yeah. In some ways, a dream come true for me, for sure. It started with, from a fairly early age onwards, developing an interest into electrical engineering. It's probably for me one of the least tangible subjects, very abstract, and it fascinated me that you can actually calculate things that you can't see or touch or smell or whatever and do useful stuff with it. That led me to, of course, focus on STEM-related topics, physics mostly, and ultimately choose to study electrical engineering. I studied Imperial College in London, where I did my undergraduate. And probably as many engineers will have is that after three years of studying, you think you know everything.
So I decided to quit my studies and join Shell, where I was lucky enough to join the first Dutch offshore wind farm project as an intern.
And that's where I got exposed to power engineering. And power engineering is something that really stuck with me because of its scale. I like big things.
The logistics that are involved with it, often it becomes quite political because those projects have a social role as well in society and supplying power to people like yourself and myself. I also realized that when I joined that project, I knew nothing. I remember the very first day when the lead engineer drew out the single line diagram of the wind farm and I could barely recognize any of the symbols he was using in it. And that then made me think, maybe I do need to continue my studies. So after I worked in that project for a year and learned a lot about high voltage, about logistics, about all the equipment and the technology that is involved in realizing such an offshore wind farm.
I decided to go back to university with renewed focus and finished my master's degree. Got the opportunity to do a PhD. So I stayed on for another three years, focusing on converter control and protection. The luxury that I could choose my own topic and choose my own supervisor. And maybe at the time it wasn't such a critical topic yet as it is today. But we were focusing on how do converters behave in case of a grid fault.

**Michael Barnard** (3:25)
Everybody became an expert on that last year overnight, after the Iberian Peninsula thing. It was amazing how many people were all of a sudden PhD level power engineers.

**Cornelis Plet** (3:35)
Yeah, AI-powered, which wasn't around the time when I was doing my PhD. In fact, we really struggled at the time to get some of the findings published, because a lot of reviewers weren't seeing this as an actual real problem yet, because we weren't having grids that were inverted dominated yet at the time. But it did set me in line for being interested into inverted base transmission. So HVDC, in fact, a gentleman that I work closely with today, Colin Davidson from GE, I remember he came to our university, Imperial College, and gave a lecture on HVDC, LCC, Line Commutated HVDC Converted Technology.
I remember thinking, now that's cool. That is really the biggest scale of power electronics, probably the highest complexity in terms of control. That is something that I quite like to do. So I applied for a job with GE Aston at the time, but was unlucky and didn't get it. So I decided to move back to the Netherlands, go and live with my partner at the time in the Netherlands, and get a job at KEMA. So in the Netherlands at that time, if you wanted to do something serious with high voltage, the KEMA short-circuit laboratories were a deep place to go to. These are the most powerful short-circuit laboratories in the world, and this is really where cutting-edge technology would be tested and validated. And of course, sometimes it didn't work out, and you would hear a mighty bang, which is always entertaining. But that company got bought up by a Norwegian company, DNV, so went with it. I moved to the advisory arm, where I did a lot of failure investigations into especially cables, but also other kinds of what we call primary equipment. And that's where I really got a real appreciation for high voltage engineering, for the quality control that is necessary to make something that can be hundreds of kilometers long.