The commercialization of digital circuit breakers

Ryan Kennedy began his career as an electrician, and after spending six years in the power distribution industry, he went to college to become a professional engineer. During his college days and soon after that, Kennedy worked on building designs, which included facilities like data centers with large power systems.

That’s when he developed this idea that the future would be electrified more than previously seen, which meant that many things had to change on the grid as well as on the electrical consumption side. Since 2003, Kennedy started noticing that while we put a big emphasis on the grid stuff, power consumption defines everything.

“At the end of the day, billions of points of consumption define the grid needs,” he added. “The idea was that if consumption is going to be the most important element of the system, then protection, visibility, and control are super important at the points of consumption.” So, Kennedy started thinking about a unified method for doing all that.

The view was that all circuits need protection, visibility, and control whether it’s a device charger or a heat, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. And if there is one element in front of everything that consumes energy, it’s the circuit breaker. “It’s universal across every industry, including residential and industrial power systems,” Kennedy said.

So, the idea was that instead of spending money on HVAC control or industrial control systems, you buy circuit breakers that can do these things. “You can do it using a sophisticated software platform, but you still need hardware to do that,” Kennedy added.

For him, that meant that there must be a new solid-state circuit breaker, utilizing semiconductors instead of mechanics to control the energy flow. There are different current ratings in electrical systems because the physics of mechanical breakers and control systems wildly change depending on which environment you are in to be fault tolerant. “Semiconductors do pretty good in fault tolerance.”

Figure 1 From an electrician to CEO of a power electronics company, Kennedy’s journey in power systems encompasses 28 years. Source: Atom Power

Solid-state circuit breakers

After co-founding Atom Power in 2014, Kennedy and his team set out to commercialize solid-state circuit breaker technology. It was certainly not a new idea; it’s been experimented with for at least four decades. “But our view was that the world needs a universal platform for protection, visibility, and control at the edge of the power grid.”

“If you look at the world’s energy, between 85% to 90% is consumed from 100-A or lower circuits,” he said. “So, we thought of solid-state circuit breaker up to three-phase and 100 A as our flagship technology product.” Kennedy added that it was more of technology development that can be applied to all markets at some point.

By 2019, Atom Power became the first company to commercialize solid-state circuit breakers. It also received the first UL listing for solid-state circuit breakers. But Kennedy and his teams also recognized that it was a new product category. “It was chaotic in the beginning, and then we realized that we have to focus on one industry, at least for the time being.”

So, in 2021, Atom Power decided to focus on a major pain point in the market: electric vehicle (EV) charging. “We’ve replaced the complexity of the traditional EV chargers with the software-defined digital circuit breaker, pairing it with application-based hardware,” Kennedy said.

Figure 2 The first UL-listed commercial solid-state digital circuit breaker facilitates centralized charging at the panel level, providing both circuit protection and EV charging. Source: Atom Power

Atom Power manufactures the circuit breaker along with the board where it sits and the peripheral equipment. The company also manufactures silicon carbide (SiC) modules that feature avalanche protection, control systems, and current sensing.

“Unlike the traditional mechanical breaker, which is a single-purpose device, we can use SiC technology to bridge the flow of energy, both from circuit protection and control standpoints,” Kennedy said. “With SiC switching, we can achieve everything in one box.”

A key thing here is that UL still requires that when a breaker trips, it’s galvanically isolated. Here, SiC does the work as galvanic connections never break under load.

Charging for EV fleets

Atom Power has recently announced to supply solid-state breaker EV charging solutions to Inovis Energy, an energy services company, which is building charging infrastructure for Mecklenburg Paint Company to transition its fleet to EVs by 2025. The project was launched in July 2023.

Figure 3 Digital circuit breaker technology enables EVs to charge from a centralized panel. Source: Inovis Energy

Inovis will install solid-state digital circuit breakers to charge vehicles from a centralized panel, eliminating the need for expensive utility upgrades. Otherwise, traditional chargers necessitate a utility transformer upgrade, thereby increasing costs and project timeline.

The system enables the installation of eight charging ports using the existing transformer capacity. Moreover, the installed EV charging ports will be fully networked for secure on-premise and cloud-based asset and power management. That’s also a step closer to the premise of dynamic power management.

Atom Power is headquartered in Huntersville, North Carolina.

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