At the CWIEME Berlin event 2023, the APC Media Team had the amazing opportunity to sit down with Thought Leaders from some of the companies at the very forefront of the energy industry. One of our guests was Francis Fisher, Head of Global Marketing for the Weidmann Group, one of the global market-leading experts on transformer electrical insulation. Here are his insights on the innovations at Weidmann and how they are helping the global grid to become more reliable. Enjoy!

We're at the CWIEME Berlin 2023 event at the Weidmann booth, and we are sitting down with Francis Fisher, the Head of Weidmann Group’s Global Marketing. Francis, thank you so much for sitting down with us.

Francis Fisher: Thank you for the grand introduction.

Our pleasure. Now, could you please tell us a bit about Weidmann, its history, and its experience in the industry?

FF: Weidmann has a long heritage in the energy sector, and while we are headquartered in Switzerland, we have production sites around the world: In The Americas, Asia Pacific region, and of course, across Europe. Our footprint very much represents our diverse customer base, where we supply both local and international companies around the world. Predominantly our business involves transformer insulation, specifically solid insulation solutions for the transformer market. We have three key product areas within our electrical business; Transformerboard, which we invented back in 1937, insulation paper, and transformer insulation components which use a combination of our board and paper materials. We provide a variety of solutions for insulating transformers from distribution all the way up to large power with both board and paper materials. There are very few transformer producers around the world who are not aware of Weidmann and/or use our materials to insulate their products.

Can you share any examples of how Weidmann has worked with customers to solve unique challenges or problems in the industry?

FF: I think one of the more interesting ones would be a project that we had with a large Southeast US utility. Geographically, as you can imagine, they experience a lot of big weather events down there, and one of the interesting things is, unlike in Europe, most of the energy network is above ground. When a hurricane or major weather event comes through the region, trees, and loose debris cause a lot of damage to the energy infrastructure. And in addition to the winds, there is also flooding, so the underground assets, such as those in property basements (hospitals, malls, etc.), are submerged and damaged. When a hurricane hits, all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of people lose power which takes a long time and a great effort from the utility line crew to restore. Given that the frequency of severe weather events is on the increase, the utility started to look at what preventative actions they could take to try and mitigate some of the risks.

They started to look at grid resilience, and the idea of grid resilience is about reducing the curve for the outage. As an example, when a hurricane hits, the power goes out and it takes, for instance, ten days to get it back on. With grid resilience as a focus, you look at how you can shorten those ten days – so you are still going to see the outage, but what can be done to get the maximum amount of people back online in the shortest possible time. When you reconfigure the network after a storm, you start to look and see what assets are still available to you to bring power back to as many people as possible. But of course, there is always asset damage, and you can't connect everybody to one or two transformers that are still available because you’ll immediately overload them. This is where Weidmann comes in. We developed a material called diamond-pattern-enhanced paper (DPE), which allows for higher thermal performance within the distribution transformer, without risking reducing the remaining life of the asset – of course, there are still temperature limitations to consider, but having the flexibility to increase the loading on a transformer for a period of time is ideal in certain circumstances.

The DPE material allows the utility to increase the load on remaining assets, in turn increasing the asset temperature, but without causing significant damage or loss of life. This enables you to reconnect more customers by reconfiguring the network. Obviously, there is a little more technical detail that goes into defining this type of project, but in essence that was the goal of this utility as part of their Grid Resilience efforts. Weidmann has engineers who supported the process of defining how this could work and providing the relevant calculations and estimates based on the utilities' goals and requirements.

Since the initial test phase, this utility, one of the largest in the USA, has specified that all distribution transformers in the future should be equipped with the DPE material.

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing the industry currently and how is Weidmann addressing these challenges?

FF: I think at the moment we're in a really strange, well, I think the term is ‘energy transition’ period. The way we use electricity today is changing as is the way we generate it. I have recently invested in my first plug-in electric vehicle, so my residential load has significantly increased at certain times of day, people are generating power at home with solar panels, and large-scale generation is transitioning from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewable plants.

This is all providing big challenges to our industry. How do we ensure that we can generate enough power to meet the changing demand and increase focus on grid security and reliability of supply? If the sun isn’t shining, if the wind isn’t blowing, how do you bridge the demand gap? How does local generation such as solar feed into this, and what about the need to transmit energy over longer distances from offshore wind farms or remote solar generation plants? Furthermore, how do you plan for capacity requirements when 50 cars are charging on a residential network at 6pm each evening? All of these challenges we are facing head-on, and I am confident that our industry will certainly find solutions!

A significant challenge for Weidmann is that resolving some of those issues requires new infrastructure. Many of our customers are backlogged and taking orders all the way out to 2029 now. So, utilities are placing orders and putting placeholders in for power transformers to be manufactured in 2029 with no spec, just a placeholder, because at the moment, the lead times are somewhere around two to five years, depending on the type of transformer. And of course, we at Weidmann feel that increased demand for our materials. Increased demand is, of course, positive but also challenging, because understandably, each of our customers would like to have their material first and be a priority for the coming years. As a business, we want to deliver as soon as possible but of course, at the quality level, which Weidmann is known for. We must balance the demand and ensure that we are supporting customers in the best possible way, as we know that they are under equal pressure from the end-users who are demanding the new assets.

What are your thoughts on the CWIEME event so far this year and have you seen any interesting developments or trends being showcased at this event?

FF: I think the event has been very successful. We see a slight change in the way that these events contribute to our business. It's a lot more structured - A few years ago we had large numbers, for example, of young engineers from some of the larger transformer manufacturers wandering around and dropping by to speak to us. Now we find it's a lot more formal where it's organized meetings with procurement departments, and senior management to discuss ongoing contracts and supply-related matters. And, of course, we try to couple that with a social event and some interaction and networking with the customers. Everyone always enjoys our Weidmann Wednesday event.

As far as innovation goes and technology, I haven't seen much, maybe because I've been stuck at the booth with visitors. I will take a walk around today so, I do hope to see something. But I think that if you speak to most of the exhibitors here, they will all tell you the same thing. They're heavily focused on delivery right now and the supply chain because of demand. And I think at times like these, I can speak at least from Weidmann’s perspective, the focus of our innovation teams is on automation, production improvements, and production efficiency. Because if we can innovate in those areas now when the demand is so high, it allows us to increase production and serve our customers better.

You partially touched on the last question with that. What is Weidmann's vision for the future of the company and the industry and how do you plan to contribute to that future?

FF: As I mentioned, I think that from Weidmann’s perspective automation is key and that's not about reducing the number of people that we employ. We employ around 2700 people globally but one of the issues out there is labour shortage. We like many others are struggling with a reduced labor pool and that's not exclusive to one particular region, it's all around the world. We experience this challenge of finding people and of course, as the industry demands that we grow and improve and deliver more products, we need more people. If we can't find those people, then maybe the smart way to go about it is to actually look at improving automation. Keeping the people that we have today but adapting their roles, so they become part of a fully automated production system to ensure that in the future we have the flexibility and the scalability to be able to produce enough material to meet the demands of all our customers at the right time.

I don't believe I'm qualified to comment on the future of the energy network. All I could tell you is, that it's going to be a real rollercoaster ride. We are seeing such a changing, dynamic environment at this time with many new projects in renewable generation, HVDC transmission lines, and even energy storage projects making their way into discussions. But one thing is clear, the industry needs to adapt, and I believe the people within our sector are rising to the challenge. In many parts of the world, we are being told to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels as consumers, switch gas heating systems to electric heat pumps, change from petrol or diesel cars to electric vehicles, and also receive rebates to install our own personal energy generation - the change is coming from all sides!

Just to wrap this topic up, I believe it's going to be exciting, and I think for people like us that work in the industry it's a great time to be involved because it's probably going to be more dynamic and we will see more change in the next 10 – 15 years than we have seen in the last 50 years.

Francis, thank you so much for these insights. It's been a pleasure.

FF: Thank you. The pleasure was all mine.