(upbeat music)
- We have done something incredible,
that many considered impossible until now.
- Most of the time when people think of electricity,
they think of lighting
but half of the energy in the world
goes into electric motors.
(engine roaring)
Motors are everywhere.
Your air conditioner,
your refrigerator,
cars,
conveyor belts.
Half of the energy that goes into motors is wasted.
So how do we make every watt of energy
and electricity worthwhile?
- A switched reluctance motor is not a new design of motor
that typically are used
in sort of bulletproof industrial applications
where you want something to run for decades at a time.
So think nuclear power plants, those sorts of things.
- They weren't available
for the rest of the world
because it was too hard to control
and that's the thing that we've taken over the finish line.
- Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time
and we need to do everything we can in our power
to reverse it.
- If we could replace every motor in the world,
with our technology,
we could cut 25% of carbon emissions.
(upbeat music)
Energy is all about supply and demand balance.
We're totally focused on the demand side
so we're trying to reduce how much generation
is required to still serve people
and that means that we can shut down
the polluting fossil fuel burning generation sources
like coal and oil and eventually natural gas
and then it accelerates the shift over to solar
and other sustainable generation technologies.
I first learned about switched reluctance motors
about six and a half years ago.
What intrigued me at first was this thing is actually
the simplest mechanical electric motor that can be made,
but you need electronics and software
that are very precisely shaping the current
that go into that motor.
- Well, you really should think of this
as almost like a fighter jet,
if the computers in that are not running,
no human could fly that plane.
But by being able to control it
with a machine learning algorithm
on relatively cheap computing power, now all of a sudden,
you can take something that is mechanically unstable,
and it ends up being more agile
and in this case more efficient, more powerful
and cheaper than any of the competing types of motors.
- What I found was this really interesting pattern
that Mr. Piyush Desai had come up with.
- The basic goal with an electric motor
is to take electrical energy in and convert it
into mechanical energy.
For our motor,
we apply a current to create an electromagnet
and we have a rotor that tries to align itself
with the electromagnet we just created.
So what we need to do is switch the current on and off
creating an electromagnet at the next coil
and the rotor tries to catch up
and spin to align itself there.
We have to switch the current on and off really fast -
20,000 times a second.
The computing power, software
and sophistication required to do that
made it quite simply impossible
until now.
(upbeat music)
- And it's finally not a hard decision
to become more energy efficient.
It's just good business.
We look for where is there the biggest delta
between what exists today and what is possible.
So that's why we're focusing on buildings
and agriculture as a big first market.
- Many Ajax systems are essentially a single speed
they're on and off.
Turntide motors have complete variable speed control
so you can run your motor at any speed
and save tremendous amounts of electricity.
(air whooshing)
- I was very skeptical at some of the claims
that Turntide was making
30 to 60 to even sometimes 70% more efficient
in the real world.
And to see those claims actually bear out
and to be able to dig into the data
that third parties had done independently
was an exciting moment for me.
- We are installing Turntide's motors
in our Spartanburg clients in order to drive efficiency
and significantly reduce the cost of electricity.
BMW i Ventures decided to invest in Turntide,
because this company is about as close to a no brainer
as we've ever seen in the sustainability space.
- If you ask anyone that works for Turntide,
they're gonna say that on a global scale,
they are working to slash the energy consumption by half
and they're going to tell you that they're able to do that
and that is what they're going to do.
- Our work has just begun.
- Our roadmap is getting into
much more advanced applications so.
- Appliances.
- Electric vehicles.
- Aerospace.
- A motor system that's intelligent
not only can minimize energy use
and maintenance for the motor itself,
but it can also propagate those savings
into broader systems like HVAC,
entire buildings,
campuses and smart cities,
- You start to look at this as
fine this is a product that maybe can save
some people some money, but in real terms,
they can save hundreds of thousands of lives
and hundreds of millions of tons of C02
going into the atmosphere.
- Replacing the motors just in buildings just in the US,
would be the carbon equivalent
of giving the world a brand new Amazon rain forest.
(upbeat music)
If you branch out to the entire world's impact,
it's about the equivalent of adding
seven Amazon Rain forests of carbon impact.
But until now, this was just an idea.
(upbeat music)
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