When we think about Britain’s push to net zero, we tend to think about wind farms and electric cars rather than the cables that connect them. Thankfully, a Manchester team is setting off million-volt lightning bolts to make sure our electrical grid is ready for the future.
The High Voltage Lab at the University of Manchester, with its towers and silver donuts, tests the electrical infrastructure that keeps our lights on and brings power to our homes.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt visited the centre this month to set off a million-volt lightning bolt, and to learn more about the work of the biggest university high voltage lab of its kind in the UK.
One of the lab’s major partners is National Grid Electricity Transmission, which owns the major energy network in the UK. It also works with other electricity transmission and distribution companies, and is now working with companies developing electric vehicles from cars to planes.
Ian Cotton, professor of high voltage technology at the University of Manchester, helped the Chancellor set off a lightning bolt in the lab. It looked fun, but setting off those bolts serves a very serious purpose.
Prof Cotton said: “Overhead lines get hit by lightning, and we have to make sure that when voltage travels down the overhead lines to the substations, the equipment in there is safe and doesn't get damaged.
“So the Chancellor was operating the generator that produces up to 2 million volts, which we need to test equipment used on the national grid.”
The most obvious examples of electrical infrastructure are pylons and overhead wires, but there’s much more to the lab’s work.
Prof Cotton said: “We support work on the transformers, overhead lines, cables, switchgear. The lab supports both the big stuff you see on the national grid but also the small stuff that's tucked away around your homes under the road that you don't see.”
A key challenge facing countries looking towards net zero is that the electrical grid will need reinforcing to cope with changing demand and changing power generation. More people will be using more power at home as they charge electric cars there. And renewable energy sources, such as wind farms, will need reliable connections to the existing network.
Prof Cotton said: “The electricity grid needs to grow for sure for both electric cars and if we switch away from gas heating and start to use heat pumps.
“To an extent we can optimise the existing network to an extent but we're still going to need to build more. And that's largely because we're knocking down old coal fired power stations, and we're replacing them with different forms of generation in different places. So the ‘roads’ that you need to move the energy from the power station to the people have got to change location.
Dr Vidyadhar Peesapati, senior lecturer in electric and electronic engineering, said the centre also helped to maintain Britain’s existing critical energy infrastructure.
He said: “The UK’s equipment can be anything from a couple of years old to sixty to seventy years old. And you cannot change all your network at the same time. It's very expensive.
“So we try and help utilities to monitor equipment. Can we put sensors on it? We do quite a lot of stuff with robotics - so can we use robotics to go into substations, because how can you monitor those?”
Dr Peesapati said the lab helped companies to learn lessons from equipment failure. He added: “There's no point in you knowing that it's failed. You want to understand when failure happens, so you can divert power and maintain power.”
The university has had a high voltage lab since 1954 and has decades of experience in the field. The current building opened two years ago as part of the institution’s £400m engineering campus.
“It's fantastic,” said Prof Cotton. “We've got those facilities both to deliver the research, but also to educate the next generation of engineers that will keep the lights on.”
If the towers and doughnuts of the lab look familiar to you, that might be because you’ve seen them from the street. The lab was built with large windows so people walking past in Grosvenor Street, off Oxford Road, can see what is happening inside. There’s one particularly striking studded structure on top of a pole that looks like a chunk of Birmingham’s iconic Selfridges building, now firing lightning bolts in a Manchester lab.
Prof Cotton said: “In the UK, we need to do more to promote engineering as a discipline that children will aspire to and want to take part in.
“If by having the windows in the lab, people can look through the window and go ‘wow’... I know it would have inspired me so hopefully, it will inspire others.”
