University of Strathclyde’s grid monitoring system gets £2.1m investment

An energy technology spin out company from the University of Strathclyde has bagged a massive £2.1m investment to aid their expansion. The company, Synaptec , received investment from Foresight Williams Technology EIS fund as well as from the newly created Foresight Scottish Growth Fund.

In total, the project secured £2m from Foresight Williams and an additional £100,000 from the Growth Fund. The money will be used to increase production and scale up the business, which is involved in reducing “power transmission, distribution and renewable generation costs by reducing outages, preventing damage, and minimizing civil works”.

Managing director and founder, Dr. Philip Orr, said of the investment,

“The backing of Foresight and Williams Advanced Engineering brings both financial acumen and world-renowned expertise in engineering design and manufacturing to Synaptec. Their support is a significant moment in the continuing growth and success of our highly interdisciplinary engineering firm as we continue to disrupt the instrumentation market and revolutionise how critical electrical infrastructure is managed and controlled.”

Synaptec were founded in 2015 as a spinout from the University of Strathclyde. Their managing director, Philip Orr, works with specialists at the University’s Institute for Energy and Environment, one of Europe’s leading power engineering research groups.

With electrical power grids becoming increasingly complex to manage, Synaptec saw an opportunity to make things easier. Their system passively monitors the grid using existing fibre optic networks.

The company uses patented technology to help energy supply businesses and power companies to achieve better insight to the mechanical, electrical and environmental state of their networks and systems.

It works through the use of optical fibre sensors, utilising existing fibre optic infrastructure already built into the networks. These sensors can measure and record the electrical current and voltage at any given point in the network, giving information in real time.

Because the system uses existing fibre networks, no power supply is required to achieve measurements. It avoids the need for expensive auxiliary equipment and works over a range of up to 100km. Measurements can be achieved in a wide range of mechanical and electrical parameters.

They claim that their technology is capable of reducing clients’ costs associated with large scale grid management. As such, deployment of renewable energy sources and security of energy supply will be cheaper, easier and more efficiently managed.

Synaptec say that their technology is the ‘first secure and scalable system for wide area fault detection, monitoring and analytics of electric power grids that is cost-effective at scale’. This investment will allow them to develop the business and the technology to make it even more capable.