Hydrogen thought leaders: Q&A with Leon White, VP Transformer Sales & Business Development at H2scan Corporation
In this Q&A, a power industry specialist and one of the thought leaders in the hydrogen monitoring industry, Leon White from H2Scan, talks about some of the changes that we face in the utility industry and the power industry as a whole.
Leon is Vice President of Transformer Product Sales and Business Development at H2scan with 30 years of experience in the utility industry including an extensive background in electric substations and online transformer monitoring. A true believer in hydrogen monitoring, Leon previously worked at Qualitrol, General Electric and Ameren. He is a Professional Engineer and a member of the IEEE Power and Energy Society. He received his Electrical Engineering and MBA degrees from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
Leon White, Vice President of Transformer Product Sales and Business Development at H2scan said:
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The applications for hydrogen monitoring are growing quickly as large amounts of money are being invested globally on hydrogen-related projects.
“Our world is committed to do what is right for the environment, and hydrogen will play a key role in making our world a better, cleaner place to live.”
Q: Leon, you have a wide experience in the utility, substation and electrical equipment monitoring industry, and today you work in the hydrogen monitoring industry where, we love to say, you make transformers better. Your perspective is very valuable as you probably talk to more customers in a week than most people do in a year. What are the issues that customers are most commonly dealing with from your perspective?
A: I have been both on the utility side, working for a utility for a number of years, and on the sales side where for years I have been involved with different kinds of online transformer monitoring. What I have learned is that, in the end, customers always want simple reliable monitors. They want sensors and monitors that last a long time and provide reliable information. Being at H2scan I now get to work with a lot of different vendors globally on hydrogen monitoring, and we have a great name in the industry. Our technology is used in a lot of brand name monitors of various OEMs, and it is the consistency, accuracy and cost effectiveness that this monitoring technology offers that makes it so ubiquitous in the industry.
Q: One of the issues that operators face today is how to process and use the data that is obtained from monitors. You provide monitors but you can’t control where the data goes and how it’s interpreted. How are you handling that and what do you think this look like for the future?
A: We have a very bright future. There are a lot of things happening with hydrogen today, from electrolyzers and fuel cells to hydrogen in natural gas pipelines. We are working on solutions to move our customers forward. There is a lot of interest not only from existing customers who install our sensors inside their products, but also from a lot of potential clients who are asking for more solutions, so we are looking for people to partner with on communication and software solutions to be able to provide more complete solutions to our customers.
Q: Transformer monitoring in transmission and generation has been around for a long time. Why is it now that we are reaching the point where we can think about putting battery-operated hydrogen monitors with communication capabilities on pole mount transformers, distribution transformers and pad mount transformers? Because what we also see is the whole grid changing, and all of the change is happening, for the most part, at the distribution level with transportation and with distributed energy resources (DER) management. So, with all this changing, what do you think is going to allow this revolution?
A: In the past, some 30 years ago, utilities didn’t even think about putting a monitor on their transformers. And as they realized that there were new innovations and different areas they could monitor on their transformers, monitoring became a staple on large transformers. Today, we have come to the point where most utilities are not going to buy a large transformer without at least some amount of online monitoring capability, which involves communications as well.
But utilities are also moving today to middle size transformers and adding some amount of monitoring to them as well. So, it is simply a natural progression as lower cost and more reliable sensors are becoming available in the market, so monitoring migrates down to lower and lower levels.
Q: How about the education of the engineers working with smaller assets? What is their level of familiarity with monitoring technology and how to use the data?
A: What I have found is that sometimes distribution engineers don’t even know what the DGA is, so I would have to explain what it stood for. As I would explain the analysis that involves taking an oil sample from a transformer, I in turn was educated that online or DGA oil samples were normally not taken from transformers outside of a substation. So, as people are moving to monitoring smaller and smaller assets, there’s a lot of education that needs to be done in the industry about the value of monitoring these assets, so that utilities that are wanting to install communications across their networks for metering or distribution automation know there’s a communication medium that can be used to bring the data back.
Q: So, monitoring across the grid moves us from reactive to proactive maintenance and self-healing grid.
A: Exactly. Monitoring provides an opportunity to prevent a failure in the grid and instead of replacing a failed transformer or going through an outage, we now have the ability to act on the indication of a failure and replace only a faulty part or route around it. So, we are helping build a more resilient and efficient grid.
Q: Apart from the hydrogen monitoring, you also have a process and safety side of the company. From your perspective, what is the potential that the company has in the future?
A: A number of applications are opening up right now with what is called the hydrogen economy. From electrolyzers that are going to generate hydrogen from water, to hydrogen fuel cells, to putting hydrogen in natural gas pipelines. Today there are a lot of hydrogen sensors on the market. Many of them don’t last very long, while others are sensitive to other things in the gas stream or in the environment, creating false alarms.
Our sensors, being hydrogen specific, are ideal for a lot of those applications. If you think about it, if you replace natural gas which is methane with hydrogen in natural gas pipelines, now they have become hydrogen pipelines and people will need to replace the carbon monoxide detectors in their homes with a hydrogen detector. Investors understand this and they have recently invested a lot of money in the development of new, lower power technologies.
Today it is difficult to power our sensors with batteries, so we want to be able to have low power, smaller sensors. Eventually we want to have wearable devices, so people working around compressed hydrogen will be alerted if there’s a hydrogen leak.
The applications for hydrogen monitoring are growing quickly as large amounts of money are being invested globally on hydrogen-related projects. There are many benefits to using hydrogen, but also many challenges. Just as renewable generation technologies like wind turbines and solar panels continue to evolve, the way we work with monitors and use hydrogen will continue to evolve. Our world is committed to do what is right for the environment, and hydrogen will play a key role in making our world a better, cleaner place to live.
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VP Transformer Sales & Business Development at H2scan Corporation, May 30, 2023
