Show notes
We talk to CEO Simone Massaro about how BaxEnergy is revolutionizing renewable energy management. Their groundbreaking software solutions that are making clean energy more efficient and accessible. And the company's recent acquisition by Yokogawa Electric Corporation will open doors for making their solutions better and more widespread.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're honored to have with us Dr. Simone Massaro CEO of BaxEnergy. And BaxEnergy has established itself as a leading provider of software solutions for the renewable energy sector. Industry.
Since its founding in 2010, the company has been at the forefront of developing cutting edge asset performance and renewable energy management systems under Dr. Massaro's leadership, BaxEnergy has gained recognition for its innovative approach to optimizing renewable energy assets, including wind farms and their solution helps energy companies monitor, analyze and enhance The performance of the renewable installations, ultimately making clean energy more efficient and accessible.
And in a significant development this year, BaxEnergy was acquired by Yokogawa Electric Corporation, a global leader in the industrial automation and control industry. This strategic move is set to bolster BaxEnergy's position in the renewable energy market and open doors to new technologies and markets.
And that's what I want to talk about today. Dr. Massaro is here today to share his insights on BaxEnergy's journey. They're groundbreaking work in renewable energy management and the exciting future ahead following the Yokogawa acquisition. Simone, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thank you. Was that an adequate introduction?
Because you guys are doing so much at BaxEnergy. It is amazing the capabilities you're providing to the renewable industry.
Simone Massaro: Yeah, I mean, BaxEnergy is essentially a software solution provider. And is focused on doing one thing and one thing only, which is making renewable energy more affordable for everyone.
And the way that we do that is by making the power plants more efficient. BaxEnergy is creating and delivering the software solution that is taking control of the renewable energy power plants, and is actually making them more efficient. In other words it's taking all the aspects of the power plants that are difficult to handle the dark side of the renewable energy and is transforming it into something more efficient.
Our history as commenced about 10 years ago with the development of a solution, which was optimizing wind farms. And was focused on wind energy. And then from that, we evolved into solar energy, hydroelectrical energy, geothermal energy. And nowadays we're working a lot with hydrogen, which is a little bit of the forefront of energy storage.
Not many people realize how difficult it is to work with renewable energy because renewable energy are by nature uncontrollable. The reason is that the source of the energy itself, the sun or the wind. They are at their source. They are uncontrollable. They are not depending on the will of the man.
So we we wanted to have energy on demand, but in reality, the sun is shining and the wind is blowing on a completely different schedule. So our focus is to make sure that it is possible to create a balance on the network by controlling this uncontrollable part of of nature. And we do that by mixing all the energy together.
Allen Hall: It's been an amazing progression, because if you think about the complexity of the energy system we have today, and where we are going, and where we have been 10 years ago, right? The, the, the issue, the early issues, and still exist today. You have a lot of energy companies that have different assets that are manufactured at different times by different manufacturers, wind and solar in particular, the big two, integrating that into a useful system.
has been very difficult for, for operators to achieve. I think you've really bridged that gap now in, in terms of software. And that had to be a big hill to climb to do that. You want to explain how you accomplished that and how you kind of working that in software?
Simone Massaro: Yeah. So that's that you, you make a very good point over there.
So, when the new energy we're representing. A very small percentage of the global energy production. They were not creating a problem, but as the amount of renewable energy has grown to reach 10%, 20%, 30% in some countries, even 50% or more of the energy being produced, this is also increasing the fluctuation on the grid.
So the grid that we had before. Which was designed for big monolithic power plants was not sufficient to handle the fluctuation and the distribution of this renewable energy power plant. So, new technologies had to be invented to put this under control, not just the monitoring, but also the capability to shut down the power plants when when a wind farm was producing too much or when a solar power plant was producing too much to avoid fluctuation.
On on the grid. So the software somewhat evolved with these challenges. At the very beginning, we were focusing on gathering the data from the power plants. And the key focus really from the utilities was just to visualize this data. Later on the challenge came because Each of these power plant is, is typically produced by a different manufacturer.
Now, you have not only different technology clearly a wind turbine works in a very different way than the solar inverter and the hydroelectric power plant or geothermal power plant. But each of these power plant may actually be manufactured by a different OEM, by a different vendor, by a different original equipment manufacturer.
And each of this vendor is actually creating its own way to exchange data and its own way to control the power plant. It's like having a different fleet of vehicles. So you can think of wind, solar and hydro making a relationship with the transportation. You can think of them as airplanes, cars.
And maybe trains and ships, essentially they're all moving people from one place to the other, but they're doing that in very different ways. And when you think of even just one of these categories, like cars, you don't have a car, you have maybe 20, 30 different type of, of, of cars. You have utility vehicles, you have trucks, you have, very different size, very different objective, but also made up from different vendors.
So that, that's the same thing that you have a renewable energy. And imagine now that you want a system to control all of these all of these equipments, all of these machines from one single place, that's what the utility need. Because effectively, utilities are not buying just wind or just solar or just hydro.
They're buying all of these technologies. They're building all of them. And they're not doing it with one vendor only. They're doing it whichever offers the best price on the market. And as we started to work with utilities, we realized that That sometime utilities were having not, not one system, not two, not three, sometime 15, 20 different systems in order to monitor their power plants.
Because each of these power plant was coming with a different system. Each wind farm was equipped with his own monitoring and control system. Each solar power plant had his own power plant control system. So surely enough, if you have so many systems, you also need a lot of operators that they have to be trained to operate these different, these very different power plants coming from very different manufacturers.
So that challenges no one had solved before us. So early 2010, we came out with the first system. Which was unifying the monitoring and the control of different renewable energy sources all under one roof, regardless of the energy type, the technology type, the manufacturer, the vendor of that power plant, regardless of the communication protocol.
Regardless, even of things like unit of measurements, imagine a wind turbine produced in the U. S. will measure the wind speed in feet per second and one produced in Europe will measure it in meters per second. So you know, these, these, these utilities, these owners of the power plants, as the number of power plants was growing, they really needed to have that unified platform.
So that was the first challenge. That we addressed.
Allen Hall: You've grown as the industry has grown in terms of capability. Your first hurdle was trying to communicate everything to communicate with one another. So many different vendors, so many different technologies. It must've taken you an immense amount of time to even get that to work.
Just to get the data. Just to get the data, right. And to make sure that it works. Properly, but then to take that knowledge and then explode it into making sure the grid is more stable. That's amazing.
Simone Massaro: Yeah. And surely enough it's taken a lot of of people actually have the calculation of that.
So to do the, the data collection, the, the capability that we have today is to interconnect every single vendor that exists in the market. Every single winter turbine buying and inverter manufacturer. That produces inverted today in the world. Do we have a protocol for that?