Our first ReFlexion on Solid State Transformers

When being less gives you more

A ReFlexion of Zian Qin, Assistant Professor at the TU Delft.

You may have ever used a transformer, or at least you may have seen a box as shown in Figure 1. In our utility grid, the voltages of the power generators (e.g. power plants, wind farms, solar farms) and loads (e.g. buildings, households, factories) are usually low (e.g. 230 V, 690 V) for safety reasons, while when the power is transmitted from the generator to the loads, the voltage is usually increased to very high (e.g. 220 kV) to enable a long-distance transmission (e.g. hundreds of km). Transformers are used to step up/down voltages, as seen in Figure 1.

Get more insight into the use of transformers and why voltages are increased and decreased in different parts of our utility grid. Read the ReFlexion of Zian here