 Yeah, it's a given Tuesday. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech Hawaii. And we're talking about Think Tech Tech Talks once in a while. We like to do tech. Okay. And this show is about MPTS, which is a special way to clean up electrical current that Brian Rogers is going to tell about. And he's with Transpower in Texas. And Valerie Shoup is an engineer also in Texas. They have separate company, but they work together on a device. That's an MPTS device, which actually cleans up electrical power. This is a very exciting show because it involves the Volga River in Russia. It involves the Tsar. It involves G. Wiz. It involves the 1840s. Those were the good old days. They didn't have pandemics that year. And all in all, this is really worth learning about. This is the kind of thing that sort of sets the stage for the industrial revolution to follow. So exciting. Welcome to the show, Brian, Valerie. Nice to see you guys. Good to be. Nice to see you, Jay. So, Brian, tell us about MPTS. You know, what is it? And tell us about the Volga River and, oh, and Jacobi. Jacobi, we want to know about Jacobi. Okay. Awesome. All right. So what we have is called a Maximum Power Transfer Solution and the MPTS unit. And where it comes from was we had a team that was doing R&D in Denver in 2001. And they were working as a subcontractor to DuPont. They were working on a desalination plant. And what they were trying to do was make electric motors more efficient. And one day while they're working, one of their neighbors walks in with a lamp, a fluorescent lamp, and says, hey, geniuses, can y'all fix this? And they said, sure, let's take a look. And so they looked at it. They determined that the ballast had burned out. And so they pulled the ballast out and left the wires just hanging loose and the guy left the lamp with them. And they ordered him a new one. A couple of days later, one of the scientists in the lab is walking around with the circuit board that runs this idea of trying to make electric motors more efficient. And for no reason at all, without anybody's permission, he wires it in to the lamp and plugs it in. And the lights come on. Well, that set off every scientist in the lab. Why did the lights come on? And it actually takes them a year to figure out what happened. And what had happened is they had solved a theorem that's called the maximum power transfer theorem. M-B-T-S. Yep. Well, yep. And the theorem had been written in 1840 by a man named Moritz von Jkobi. He was German born, Jewish. And so he was the Einstein of his day. And in 1840, this man is working for the Tsar in Russia like you said well ago. And he is working on electric motors and batteries so way ahead of his time in 1840. And he builds a boat. And the boat actually can carry 14 people. He puts in the batteries. He puts in the electric motor. He has to invent some kind of a propeller because there aren't propellers yet. And the boat is actually able to go three miles an hour upstream on the river. But the batteries fail sooner than Jkobi thought they were going to fail. And so he does the trip again. And he does the trip again. He does it like 10 times. And it's always failing early. And so this guy, being the great mathematician scientist that he was, sits down and says, well, I'm going to write something that's going to get the most power from those batteries to that motor. And so he writes what's called the maximum power transfer theorem today called Jkobi's law. And so now the law doesn't get solved. It doesn't get solved until computers get fast enough. And in 1996, the engineers at Bose solved it at really low power levels for their sound systems. And then five years later, in 2001, is when the trans power engineers were working for DuPont and their neighbor walks in with the lamp. And so it was solved by accident, basically. But a lot of great things happen by accident. So Valerie, I take it that solve means that you want to set things up so that you get it to work best. But how does that work? Is this sort of like Edison or Tesla where you do a sort of trial and error? Is that why solving takes so long, requires so much time? How do I start? So if I wanted to solve Jkobi's law myself, what would I do? Well, the important thing is you have to figure out how to get the energy from point A to point B. So a lot of energy today is lost. It's lost either in heat, lost in a number of ways. And that's why equipment is inefficient. So it's not using all of the energy that is delivered to it. So what the NPTS, it takes all that energy that's not delivered to the equipment and it recycles it and puts it back in the system. And that's why we say that they solve Jkobi's law because the energy coming into the system is being used in the system. Ah, okay. So you have to have a device that will do all this. I guess there's a lot of... What do you need in this device? What kind of resources, electronic devices do you need within the NPTS device to achieve this? Well, it's just like with your cell phone, right? You have your motherboard with all these computer algorithms in there. And I mean, it's amazing. I can't figure out how the cell phone works, right? It's amazing to me that I can get on my cell phone and I can find my way and I can make a phone call. Well, the NPTS works just like a cell phone because it's a surge suppressor. It also addresses harmonics 3 to 51 dynamically and it recycles the excess energy and puts it back into the system. So it's basically a device acting like a cell phone for your electrical power system in your building. So just before we go too much further, harmonics, what is that? So when you have different... Okay, so back in the day, we didn't have a lot of equipment failures. Why was that? Because everything in the building what took AC electricity. So nowadays we have a lot of DC devices. We have variable frequency drives, things that are changing in frequency. So what harmonics are, it's when the sine waves don't match up, okay? So when you have DC devices running in an AC system, your sine waves are out of sync with each other. And that's how you end up with harmonics. It's kind of like going down a highway with too many cars and the highway gets backed up. Well, that's what happens when you mix DC with AC power. It's like being on a freeway and so all the cars are backing up. And so you need to take care of that traffic jam, right? So the MPTS is taking care of that electrical traffic jam and putting that excess power back into the system. Yeah, harmonics sounds like a big part of that then. So this has been going on, as Brian said, how long has it been going on? When was this solving of the Jacobi's theorem? When did that happen here in recent times? They solved it in 2001, but they didn't make the first prototype of the MPTS unit until 2008 when they finally dawned on them that it made sense to try to clean up the electricity in an entire building rather than just a light bulb, which is what had happened in 2001 when the light bulb turned on. It has to be significant challenges of going from one light bulb to a whole building. Yeah, tremendous, tremendous challenges. There were 22 engineers and basically 10 years of research went into it. You can say they really made it in 2013 when underwriter's laboratories gave them the stamp of approval in March of 2013. Just say that it wouldn't catch fire and burn the building. Well, in a bigger deal than that was the underwriter's laboratory had required them to give them 16 MPTS units for the testing and when the underwriter's laboratories guys figured out what the MPTS was doing in terms of creating a clean electrical environment, they bought all 16 units and said, you can't have these back. We want them because they're doing all this testing that they need pure electric environments in and they told our now CEO, Adeel Kahn, they told him that they'd spent six million dollars trying to create a clean electrical environment and Adeel and his team had done it. Yeah, well, this is barely not even 20 years ago. How come I didn't see this on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every other newspaper and technical magazine? How come this kind of thing hasn't been made ubiquitous around the world? How come? That's a good question. I've only been with Transpower for two years and pretty much what I've picked up on is that Adeel doesn't believe in advertising, so that's a bad thing from my standpoint so he doesn't go with a lot of TV or anything and I think at first maybe he was scared of some of the bigger boys stealing the idea even though I think that they've got to solve Jacobi's law and how long is that going to take and are they going to even be able to do it? No way to know. So who is Adeel? Adeel Kahn? Okay, so he's president and CEO of Transpower Company. He was running the team in 2001 that solved Jacobi's law. Did he get a patent out of it? Oh yeah, they've got patents in 28 countries now and it is all around the world. It's just more word of mouth. So it's in Dubai, it's in New Zealand, it's in Australia, it's in Switzerland, it's in Canada, it's in Mexico, but there's just, but it's not thousands of units yet. I do think that there'll be a time when there will be thousands of units because but at this point we get... Valerie, if I wanted to make an MPTS unit, what would I need aside from two cans in a string? I don't think you could make it. It would be very difficult. My question is could you make a cell phone? I don't think so. I could make an MPTS unit either. I just know how it operates and honestly you say why is it not more widely because people can't believe that it saves energy and that's the differentiator between MPTS and all of these other power factor devices that all these big companies are selling. So they will sell you power factor correction equipment, they'll sell you surge suppressors, they'll sell you harmonic filters. All of these things are in this one device but what it also does is it recycles energy and people can't wrap their minds around that. I couldn't wrap my mind around it for a long time until I started seeing the data because what people will tell you is oh well power conditioners don't save energy and I'm telling them you're right power conditioners do not save energy but MPTS does. It's the only device like it in the world. Well you know there's all this to go a step further on that there's you know people are trying to be efficient now they're into clean green energy renewables energy efficiency at home. I mean in Hawaii we have a lot of companies that specialize in coming around to your house and consulting with you and telling you how to make your house more efficient you know and save money you know in terms of your energy bill. So is there a device I mean can I buy a device such as the one you know that Brian mentioned the light bulb device and put it in my house that would you know that would be very appealing on the market wouldn't it? Well actually there I see Transpower is negotiating with Costco to do a homeowner's size device but it's still going to be expensive though because it's it's $2,500 $3,000 so you got to have a big house for that to make sense. Why is it so expensive? Is it because you know Transpower just wants the money or is it because it's the cost of you know making the device is expensive? It's the cost of making the device it's a lot there's a lot of expensive electronics in the device and so and I'm not sure that houses are really going to have enough problems that it makes sense it's much more industry that has problems. Okay you have some charts and graphs you want to show us how you know an installed MPTS unit is going to help a given building and I would like to know the metrics about how much help it will actually provide. Okay yeah let's do that if you can show the first picture of installed units and okay so at the bottom left to right that that first one is in a hospital the second one is in a pump station for a water provider that's in the Denver area and then the third one is in a fruit processing plant that's near Fresno California and the fourth one is actually at a government center like a courthouse. And so but in each case you can see the units and then you can see how they're they're wired in and so they have to be 30 feet from the main electric panel in each case. Why? Why? Loss, losses beyond that. So now can we look at the the second diagram? So the second diagram what we're doing is this has an actual building and that's in Los Angeles downtown Los Angeles and I've got a label MPTS one two and three and that number one is is really primarily on the mechanical panel which is the chiller and so the air conditioning for the whole building. Two is is back on the main panels it's picking up the other sub panel and and miscellaneous stuff including the on the main panels the elevators and lighting and stuff and then number three MPTS number three is picking up everything everything else and number three is the closest to the mains I mean I'm sorry to the to the actual meters coming in from the electric company and number one is the farthest away from it and so if we could look at the the next the next slide then this is called this is a live dashboard and let's see it's very small for me right now but the what what we've got is a power factor that's the red it'd be the second one on from the left at the top and what's that power factor showing 0.88 or something like that it's 0.803 okay power factor and so that is what the building is actually and then after the power is cleaned up at the MPTS unit it's cleaning the power up so the power factor is 0.971 what's a power factor and why do I care about it so power factor is an indicator of how efficiently your building is using electricity so if you have a low power factor your building is extremely inefficient and you probably have a high degree of harmonics when you have a high degree of harmonics you will also have a high degree of equipment failure because harmonics damage all the equipment in your building by way of vibration or something else harmonics often cause cause heat a lot of heat and it's really the heat that like breaks down the grease and pumps and motors and that type of thing people who own buildings normally do infrared testing on their buildings and they'll be able to detect hot spots but your motors will run hotter and all your equipment will run hotter when you have a lot of harmonics in the system okay so efficiency of eight going to nine what does that what does that mean in terms of overall efficiency and and cost well let's look at the the the chart again the third line down at the bottom it says what the load power I mean the this is amps now what the load amps were and what the what the main amps are so the the amps that are coming from the power company how many are and then but what the actual equipment has needs to to operate and what's happening is in that case on that mpts unit it's that's a savings 47.1 amps which turns out to be 39 kilowatts so right now we're saving 39 kilowatts in in this particular uh on that particular mpts unit what does that what does that mean in california in dollars do you have any idea uh they're paying about somewhere around 20 cents a kilowatt hour so so whatever 39 times 20 sits for that hour is and then it's you know so this this whole system is paying for itself in about two years in los angeles and they have three mpts units and so now the list can we go to the other chart the other chart is is the one that's connected to that's closest to the meters and so what the power company is seeing is that 0.999 you see that in the blue mm-hmm but the power factor is what i can't read it nine point 992 okay 992 and then it's 999 so that one has we've gotten we've already gone through mpts three through mpts two to mpts one and and so they're all talking together they have artificial intelligence and so they talk and they've handed off the to finally the uh there's almost no loss from this from the power company standpoint it's 0.999 in power factor then that last one let's see mpts three is saving 37.8 amps which is 31.4 kilowatts the whole building is saving 82.553 kilowatts when you add all three of the mpts is together and so where is that savings coming from we're removing the inefficiencies see the load in each case where it was what the load power factor was and the load amps that that's what the building was requiring but because we've recycled the problem power the harmonics and what's also called kvar which is reactive power it's uh reactive power is like you know motors run in a circle but the the electricity is coming in and the and half of the motor is running against the the incoming electricity and then and then and even though it's alternating current well then and the other half of the motor is running against the the other half of the alternating current so that causes losses it's called kvar and so the mpts is able to recycle the kvar and it actually is removing the harmonics it it flushes them just like it was a water drain and it was like it was all water there was a drain in the middle of the floor and it flushes that out and it removes that the harmful part recycles the kvar and suddenly we've got 82 kilowatts that we wouldn't have had so it's impressive so um you know how long is it take to install this if i if i called you up brand uh and valerie and and say look i got a building and i want to put this kind of equipment in my building and save that 82 kilowatts how long would it take you to do that once you have the equipment in place you can in you can install it in a day you can install it and commission it in a day so obviously you'd have to order the equipment and we'd have to make it and then ship it to you is it is it big and heavy um or is it or is it small and light the uh the size that we were looking at in the photographs while the growth weigh about 800 pounds and yeah yeah and so and this in that building that we were showing uh there were three of those units that weigh 800 pounds and so but it's better to put smaller ones because the next size up is a 490 amp that's a 240 amp that we were talking and the next size up is 490 amps and it weighs like 1800 pounds and but it's better to go with more of the 240s than one big 490 because yeah these are these why why is it better to have a bunch of smaller ones getting closer to the loads and getting closer to the problems like one of the biggest problems in the building is the chiller and then the next probably the next biggest problem in the building is the elevator the elevator only uses half of the electricity delivered to it the chiller uses 80 percent maybe and sometimes it drops to where they're only using 70 percent but uh so those are your two biggest problems now if you're in a factory though your factory equipment could all be running 70 only using 70 percent or 60 percent the electricity it's being delivered to them so so we need to be closer to the loads and and then we we clean up the problems there so where where are these uh devices manufactured are they manufactured in in texas are they manufactured in the united states uh you have factory is there a factory yeah it's in atlanta so they it's it's all us parts except there's one piece that comes out of germany uh that actually deals with the harmonics and and it's just because it's the best in the world and we couldn't beat it with there's no american part right now that's beating that german part so if i wanted to i wanted to outfit the building you described with the you know the three separate mpts units what give me a rough range about what that would cost to to install that in the building those 240 240 units or 50 000 each and then installs maybe 5 000 each so probably 165 000 and you've got that but they're recapturing that 165 000 inside of two years there in los angeles and y'all i understand your situation you got my text in there the y'all the uh yeah there it is yeah uh the uh y'all got a lot higher electrical rates in oi than than we do in texas that's for sure we're working on that the other thing is okay two years uh it you know it it pays for itself in two years but how long do these units last do they deteriorate after all there's a big load um their sophisticated designs uh uh uh their secondary effects of handling you know all this power that make them deteriorate over time how long was the useful life it's uh 20 years basically uh but you've got it you know as long as you're taking care of it there are actually are no moving parts and uh except for cooling fans and so it has cooling fans and those the filters on the fans need to be changed every year and they need to be checked and in all the other parts we've we've got a a package that's $500 worth of parts and we and you can sit on your shelf and and one of your engineers can just go in and say oh this one's this one quit and then they they plug that in and instead so it's uh it's gonna last for a long time and if it's well if it's well maintained it's gonna last for a long time well I mean you know it strikes me that um you know this this is useful for a building owner although the economics are um you know you have to factor in for example in a in a in a standard office building the the owner is going to try to pass through the expense of the tenants either in in one lump sum or you know it's kind of an assessment or on a monthly basis and so it's not going to fall on him it's going to ultimately fall on the tenants and so there's an interesting economics question I'm sure that if you're selling to landlords that they're going to be talking about this kind of thing but what strikes me is that in in the in the in the final analysis um this is a pretty exciting technology that if it's miniaturized and made maybe cheaper somewhere uh who knows I I you know China still does present itself as a place where this could be manufactured manufactured um you could put it in computers you could put it in all kinds of electronic gear little ones little ones that big uh and you could save energy save harmonics save deterioration through the equipment and and have a lot of benefits uh have to bring the cost of manufactured down um and that have to be licensing out to whoever was going to market it because you know marketing to office buildings is is one kettle of fish marketing to you know a global supply of computers and computer devices that's another kettle of fish yeah do you see that happening or or or not well they tell you a quick story well a real quick story on that a deal told me that some Koreans showed up at at Transpower Company and they had rebuilt the MPTS unit they had taken it they've done reverse engineering they put it all together and and they brought it to him and he said it was beautiful and and then they said can you make it work and the problem was that it gets down to a motherboard and a chip and the chip's got Jacobi's law on it and it does Jacobi's law the solution to Jacobi's law four million times a second and then the motherboard is able to make changes of the electrical system up to 20 000 per second 20 000 times a second normally they only need to change it 400 or 600 or 800 different things need to be changed so it's way way ahead of schedule but anyway the Koreans were had done everything right but once they broke into the black box that had the motherboard in it they corrupted it and it wouldn't work so yeah I know and then so so so that's the that's the real magic the rest of it they could copy and now you you mentioned putting it like in computers and things it it actually doesn't need to be in computers because they're they are DC power so they're direct current and don't need they're not having the losses DC power doesn't have the same kind of losses that AC power has but it's dangerous like 12 volts of DC can kill you you know if you read your car battery and you did it wrong and you get stuck holding it 12 volts of DC can kill you but you could with AC you can reach out and and actually tap that 110 volts that's at your house you're not going to like it it's going to bite you but it's not going to grab you and kill you okay so really where MPTS is oh I'm sorry I was just going to mention really the best places for MPTS are things like hospitals where you have millions of dollars of electrical equipment that you want to protect data centers where you have all this precious data that needs to be protected I see it as an insurance policy because of it does it's a surge suppressor as well as saving energy the real savings here is in extending the life of your equipment and protecting your equipment from surges spikes that all buildings experience so I would say it's a must on hospitals it's a must on manufacturing plants it's a must on data centers we're almost out of time you guys and I want to ask you one more question just it's left un unresolved in my mind is so Jacobi made the theorem this this you know could have enormous effect going forward after a delay of oh my gosh 1840 till now um but but did he ever solve the theorem no he didn't solve his own theorem couldn't solve his own theorem and actually a deal con told me they said jacoby has no idea how good a job he did writing the theorem that that it the theorem is magic and and so no he couldn't solve his own theorem had to get to computers and and being fast enough computers for it to be solved how interesting okay so it's transpower in dallas did you say well based out of denver based out of denver and you're in dallas got it okay and valerie you're you're in dallas with a sustainable what is it heritage institute of sustainability all right you guys thank you very much for coming on the show and telling us about this really important technology and I hope we see it again I hope it becomes ubiquitous I think ultimately somebody's somebody who watches think deck right now will pick up on this and you know they'll be knocking a pad you know to your door thank you very much thank you thank you bryan and valerie