Photonics Engineer

Trine Energy is a UK based early stage startup developing products for transmission of electrical power (1MW+) using power of fiber (PoF) as the core technology. PoF is already in use in many industries; however the power used in those applications is in milliwatts. Our power transmission target is orders of magnitude higher. It is a challenging yet exciting problem to solve.

We are working on the hypothesis that the production of power is a solved problem. Solar and wind based energy production has been rapidly scaling since the start of the century. In fact there is too much generation of solar and wind power in many European countries leading to curtailment and negative spot price of electricity. The renaissance of nuclear reactors and the advancements in fusion mean there will be no shortage of electrical power.

The challenge will be to distribute that power at a national and global scale. Today the only option of distributing electrical power over distance is the power grid. It works, but just. It is a super old technology that takes immense effort to build or expand, and is costly to maintain. According to various studies, ~$1 Trillion of annual investment is needed globally to upgrade and expand the grid networks to reach net zero target by 2050.

Governments don’t have fiscal capacity to make such investments. It has not seen any real innovation for a very long time and there is none on the horizon to significantly reduce the cost. It gets unstable when there is too much intermittent power in the mix, which goes against the global drive for energy transition. It is fragmented, and has no global scale.

Laser and fiber optic, in comparison, are modern technologies, enjoying rapid innovation. Both are highly flexible products. They have many interesting properties that electricity and power cables don’t have. They can be produced in significantly higher volumes and are easy to deploy. Their cost and performance are improving at Moore’s law scale. This opens the opportunity for us to build products and become an alternative to specific use cases that are easier to develop and implement in the near term, such as providing power redundancy using short distance transmission (