Design, Test and Demonstration of Saturable Reactor High-Temperature Superconductor Fault Current Limiters
Zenergy Power has successfully designed, built, tested, and installed in the US electrical grid a saturable reactor Fault Current Limiter. Beginning in 2007, first as SC Power Systems and from 2008 as Zenergy Power, Inc., ZP used DOE matching grant and ARRA funds to help refine the design of the saturated reactor fault current limiter. ZP ultimately perfected the design of the saturated reactor FCL to the point that ZP could reliably design a suitable FCL for most utility applications. Beginning with a very basic FCL design using 1G HTS for a coil housed in a LN2 cryostat for the DC bias magnet, the technology progressed to a commercial system that was offered for sale internationally. Substantial progress was made in two areas. First, the cryogenics cooling system progressed from a sub-cooled liquid nitrogen container housing the HTS coils to cryostats utilizing dry conduction cooling and reaching temperatures down to less than 20 degrees K. Large, round cryostats with warm bore diameters of 1.7 meters enabled the design of large tanks to hold the AC components. Second, the design of the AC part of the FCL was refined from a six legged spider design to a more compact and lighter design with better fault current limiting capability. Further refinement of the flux path and core shape led to an efficient saturated reactor design requiring less Ampere-turns to saturate the core. In conclusion, the development of the saturable reactor FCL led to a more efficient design not requiring HTS magnets and their associated peripheral equipment, which yielded a more economical product in line with the electric utility industry expectations. The original goal for the DOE funding of the ZP project Design, Test and Demonstration of Saturable Reactor High-Temperature Superconductor Fault Current Limiters was to stimulate the HTS wire industry with, first 1G, then 2G, HTS wire applications. Over the approximately 5 years of ZP's product development program, the amount of HTS wire employed per FCL and its cost as a percentage of the total FCL product content had not dropped substantially from an unsustainable level of more than 50% of the total cost of the FCL, nor had the availability increased (today the availability of 2G wire for commercial applications outside of specific partnerships with the leading 2G wire manufacturers is extremely limited). ZP had projected a very significant commercial potential for FCLs with higher performance and lower costs compared to the initial models built with 1G wire, which would come about from the widespread availability of low-cost, high-performance 2G HTS wire. The potential for 2G wires at greatly reduced performance-based prices compared to 1G HTS conductor held out the potential for the commercial production of FCLs at price and performance levels attractive to the utility industry. However, the price of HTS wire did not drop as expected and today the available quantities of 2G wire are limited, and the price is higher than the currently available supplies of 1G wire. The commercial option for ZP to provide a reliable and reasonably priced FCL to the utility industry is to employ conventional resistive conductor DC electromagnets to bias the FCL. Since the premise of the original funding was to stimulate the HTS wire industry and ZP concluded that copper-based magnets were more economical for the foreseeable future, DOE and ZP decided to mutually terminate the project.