Ireland is working toward sourcing 80% of its electricity from renewable sources in just six years.

One of the key players in this mission is the Head of Engineering at EirGrid who is responsible for overseeing the delivery of critical grid infrastructure. In this podcast she shares experience on the complexities of integrating renewable sources like wind and solar into the grid, about balancing supply and storage solutions, plus technical and regulatory hurdles that engineers must navigate. She also speaks about the challenges she has had to face personally as an engineer in this role. 

Listen now to get a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of Ireland's power grid and our transition to renewable energy.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• The role of Head of Engineering at EirGrid
• Do we have a creaking old grid?
• Problems storing energy from renewable sources
• Moving energy across long distances
• The planning system
• Challenges she is facing in 2025

GUEST DETAILS
Louise O’Flanagan is the Head of Engineering and Asset Management at EirGrid, a Fellow of Engineers Ireland, and a leader with two decades of experience in the field.

With her long experience connecting customers such as wind farm developers to the national grid, she possesses a deep understanding of the intricate workings of the power system and the challenges of integrating renewable energy sources.

Louise on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-o-flanagan-3a12ba3a/
EirGrid Website - https://www.eirgrid.ie/ 

 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

 

QUOTES
"Leadership is one part of project management. Leadership is about getting people to buy into what you want to deliver and to want to help and assist you in that."

"There is definitely a shortage of female engineers in Ireland. 23% of engineers coming out of university are female and that drops to about 12% actually entering into the workforce. EirGrid have a very active graduate program where you'd see 50% of our graduates are female."

"As an engineer, you can have the most perfect plan on paper. But unless you actually meaningfully engage with your stakeholders, that may be where that plan will stay. On paper."

"It's what a lot of engineers’ face when they're delivering infrastructure projects. First, you need to explain what the need of the project is, but then also listen and take on board that feedback. You must engage with the community."

KEYWORDS

#engineering #renewable #grid #womeninengineering #eirgrid

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  0:00 
Right now on Amplified, lessons learned from an engineer leading the charge for renewable energy in Ireland.

Louise O'Flanagan  0:05 
You know, as an engineer, you can have the most perfect plan on paper, but unless you actually meaningfully engage with your stakeholders, that's maybe where that plan will stay. On paper. It's one lesson that I took away and I've learnt a lot from that experience.

Dusty Rhodes  0:21 
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Journal podcast.
Energy demands are skyrocketing and the system needs upgrading. But how are we ensuring a reliable electricity supply and embracing renewable resources today, we're joined by a principal engineer who will share EirGrids ambitious plans to transform the power system and accommodate 80% renewable energy by 2030. She'll also fill us in on the vital role of engineers in this transformation, the complexities of integrating renewable energy and overcoming regulatory hurdles. It’s a pleasure to welcome a Fellow of Engineers Ireland and a leader with two decades of experience in this field, where today she is Head of Engineering at EirGrid, Louis O’Flanagan. You're very welcome.

Louise O'Flanagan  1:09 
Hi, Dusty. How are you really nice to talk to you.

Dusty Rhodes  1:15 
Let me start off with asking about the role of Head of Engineering, for those who may not be familiar with it, what is the Head of Engineering in EirGrid? What does it entail?

Louise O'Flanagan  1:27 
So my role is, I'm within our infrastructure department, and my main focus is providing engineering teams to oversee the delivery of grid infrastructure. And that kind of encompasses setting the standards, the specifications that infrastructure needs to be built to so it can be part, become part of the grid. We've teams of engineers that go out to site or review designs to make sure they're adhering to those standards. And I also have a team that look after asset management. And so that's the grid that's already built. How are we maintaining that is the coming to end of life? Do we need to replace it and refurbish it? So really take care of the grid that we already have, and the teams that we have look after both the grid that's onshore and what will be the new grid that's going to be built offshore to facilitate offshore wind.

Dusty Rhodes  2:10 
One of the things I hear about the grid is problems with getting new renewable energy sources onto the grid in the first place, and because you literally have to make Hey, while the sun shines, what do you do when you have a surplus? How do you how do you store that electricity? What's the thinking on that problem?

Louise O'Flanagan  2:27 
So there's a few things that we can do to support that. So one is, we want to make sure that we have a balance of what's called thermal or conventional generation on the grid. That's kind of the base that we have there, and then we'll have renewables that will be supplying at other times. But you're right, sometimes we are going to have surplus renewables on the grid, and what we want to do there is we want to interconnect to other countries, to other grids, and be able to export that energy when we have a surplus in Ireland. And obviously, the converse of that is when we don't have sufficient renewables being generated on our grid here, we can import we also are looking at, you know, other technologies, such as batteries that can store some of that energy now that still has to go to such a large scale that we would that we can depend on it solely for that purpose. So we'll still remain to be a mix. And there's also other things that need to be brought in as well. So it's not just a case that we can say, once we do all those things, that's it, when we walk away, we need to be able to support the grid as well and make it stable. So there's technologies such as synchronous condensers that need to be built onto the grid as well. And so it's air grid's job to make sure that we have a balance of generation to meet demand. We don't actually generate anything ourselves, but just to make sure that we're planning and developing that grid to accommodate it and then to operate it so that it does remain secure.

Dusty Rhodes  3:41 
So with your engineers hat on and your genius problem solving, when you look at the storage of electricity, what is it that are you actually working on anything at the moment? What are the ideas being floated around?

Louise O'Flanagan  3:55 
In 2021 we launched our roadmap called shaping our electricity future, and that set out how we were going to achieve a grid that was capable at that point, 70% renewables, and now we're looking at 80% renewables, and that's bringing on about 17 gigawatts of renewables in the next 10 years onto the grid that's going to be a mix of wind, of solar, of offshore wind, of battery storage to be able to support that and and it's not just about building new grid to do that, it's about using the existing grid that we have already. And you mentioned some of that grid is quite old, and it is so it's going to be a combination of where we can use our existing grid, make it work harder, make it work smarter. Is it capable of carrying more and deploying new technology to try and do that? Make it work differently, to try and also then incorporate technology to make the grid operate in different ways. So we have a number of initiatives such as dynamic line ratings. So that's looking how, say an overhead line is operating in real time, as opposed to assuming a certain value of what the capacity is of the line. We have other technologies, such as power flow controllers that will actually make the. Power flow through different circuits, through different routes on the grid, to try and reduce some of the, you know, the constraints that we have, or the congestion that we have on the grid. So it's not just one single thing that will make us achieve that. It's a series of different steps that, in combination, will help us to get to those targets that have been set. We'll also need to build new grid that is also there. That's a need that we have. So we need to build more transmission lines, more substations, as we realize that growth over the next 10 years as well. So it's not just a combination bringing on renewables. We're also seeing growth in demand on the island, and we have new interconnectors that are going to be built over to France. EirGrid is progressing, which should be energized in 2026 that's the Celtic interconnector project, and we'll have another one to the UK. That's a green link project. So there's a lot happening on the grid right now. And in fact, if I look at just even Dublin, which is where I live, we have a initiative called the pairing up Dublin scheme, and that is essentially replacing older cables on our grid. They're about 40 to 50 or 60 years old, those cables, so they've come to end of life, and they need to be replaced. But there's an added benefit that the cables that we now replace them with, well, they're going to be newer technology. They're going to be higher capacity, and it means that we can have that added benefit of not just replacing the old cables, but the new cables that come in are going to help us reach that demand growth in Dublin and also help us move renewable energy around the grid. So the renewable energy that's going to come, say from the west of Ireland, and indeed, the offshore wind that's off the east coast of Ireland as well. So it's a really great way of trying to make the grid work in different ways and make most of it, and that's where our network planners come into that picture and try and set out how that roadmap will be developed.

Dusty Rhodes  6:39 
And because, I mean, what I hear is that, you know, the air grid, the whole grid needs, it's been there for 100 years, and we need to put a new one in, all right, that now, that's my uneducated view of what I'm hearing. And you mentioned about certain parts of the grid reaching end of life, which, of course, it does, yeah, roughly, if you were to throw a percentage on it, all right? And I'll say that. I'm not going to quote you on this, because I can ask for statistics. But do you think like we're at a stage where half of the grid needs to be replaced, or a quarter of it needs to or all of it needs to be replaced? No,

Louise O'Flanagan  7:13 
It's nothing like that. I mean, what we have is we've had different stages of building the grid depending on what was needed. You know, we would have had large generation plans, say, built in the 80s or the 90s. And then, you know, when we had 2020 targets, we had a significant amount of grid built again to accommodate that, to get to 40% renewables. There's been a huge amount of investment on the grid. This is just an increased step change, and we're going to be investing billions of euros in developing new grid. I mean, at the moment, we probably have in the region of 200 substations, and there's about 7500 kilometers of circuit. And we estimate that within the next 10 years, we're probably going to see an increase of that number by about 30% of new assets onto the grid. So it's quite a considerable increase. And as I said, where we have, maybe some of the circuits that are older and that we want to replace them, we're going to replace that with newer technology so we can make the most of the grid that we already have.

Dusty Rhodes  8:09 
How do you approach that problem, then, of asset management and innovation? Because firstly, you're you're looking at what's there, what you might need, and then you're looking at what you have now. And I mean, it's terrific looking at new technology, but not all of it is going to be here in 10 years time. Do you know what I mean? Something else would have come along to replace it. So when you're when you're thinking about asset management and innovation, what is the little checklist of things that you do off in your head?

Louise O'Flanagan  8:36 
Well, for me, it goes right back to the start of what is our obligation? It's a license obligation, statutory application, safe, secure, reliable transmission system. And when you're making that investment decision, and when you're making decisions about replacing existing assets, that's what I would have in the back of my mind. Is what we're doing like, are we achieving those objectives right now, or do we need something new to do that? And will it do that in 10 years time? Will it be able to do it in 20 or 30 or 40 years time? And that's the horizon that you're looking at. Like we need to build grid to last, because it takes quite a long time to deliver like by the time we go through planning, what's needed then actually engaging with our stakeholders, with communities, with landowners, and delivering that infrastructure, going into planning process, and then we work very closely with ESB networks for the delivery side of it. It can take quite a number of years to deliver on that infrastructure. So we want to make sure that what we're deciding on is built to last for decades, and it is that kind of future generations that we're thinking of and when we have that purpose in mind.

Dusty Rhodes  9:40 
So then, when you were thinking about what you have to do, say 2025, next year. Okay, what's your own biggest personal challenges you're thinking about for next year? You go, Oh, God, I have to sort this.

Louise O'Flanagan  9:54 
What is immediately ahead of me in the short term is about some of the newer projects that we. Want to deliver over, say, in the West of Ireland, so the North conic projects and we have deployment of new technology onto the grid. But also we'll be looking at what are those, say, circuits or substations that now need to be revisited and see if they're operating correctly or if they come to end of life. So it'll start to look at what that portfolio for the future brings, and also the accommodation of offshore wind. Because, you know, the target is to get five gigawatts of offshore wind connected by 2030 and so that is a very short timeframe in which we need to get all of these projects moving. The first round of them are going to be delivered by developers with their grid delivering a second round on the south coast. So there's a huge focus on offshore wind, it really offers up a step change for us, for Ireland in achieving those renewable targets of 80% so that's probably what the next year will look like for me anyway, and for my colleagues, keeping in mind

Dusty Rhodes  10:52 
that Ireland is aiming to have 80% of the electricity generated by 2030 there's one point that I always here where it's a clog point in any major project or infrastructure or whatever it is, and it's always the planning system. It's a bottleneck, and it's a bottleneck for renewable energy projects as well as anything else. Is this causing any concern for future proofing the grid?

Louise O'Flanagan  11:18 
I think what the planning system is seeing is there's quite a lot of infrastructure being built at the moment and being going through the planning system. So not just for grid, but, you know, there's lots of other projects that are also being submitted at the moment, as well as housing and growth. So it's quite a considerable amount of economic growth in Ireland at the moment, we're seeing lots of projects being progressed. So I think what EirGrid can try and do to support that is when we bring projects to the consenting stage, is that we've, you know, we've done a lot of our done a lot of work before we even get to that stage, in terms of looking at what the options are in front of us, seeing what is the best option that we have, engaging, as I said, with stakeholders and landowners and communities, so that we have really engaged them, told them about the project, taken on board, their feedback, so that when we do get into the planning system, that we have done a huge amount of work of understanding what is the best project that we can bring forward.

Dusty Rhodes  12:15 
The reason I ask that is because when you feel like you're an ordinary engineer and you're going through this planning system, then you're looking, well, air grid wouldn't have that problem because they're enormous, so it's just kind of nice to hear they use the same problems as the rest of us.

Louise O'Flanagan  12:29 
We would factor it in, I suppose it's factoring in that timeline in. When I'm talking about those delivery timelines, we'd have already considered that it might take about 12 months for us to come through the planning system,

Dusty Rhodes  12:41 
You were telling me before we came on the podcast, and I thought it was a great story, and it was a case study that we were chatting about, and it's all to do with the planning system and talking to people, and this whole thing about a substation in Ireland where where you were going to locate it, and, and you kind of thought, yeah, substation. Who cares? But that wasn't the case. What happened?

Louise O'Flanagan  13:04 
Yeah, it's, it was one, when we were chatting about it, I was, you know, I thought about, it's one of the first projects I took on when I joined air grid. So it's going back maybe about 12 years. This project had quite a remote area of Ireland, the West of Ireland, in terms of infrastructure be built. It was quite modest, you know, a substation. It's all enclosed within a building. You can't actually see much of the electrical infrastructure. And was going to connect into an existing overhead line. So I suppose, from my perspective, I thought it was going to be quite a short project, and quite maybe quickly into delivery. And as always, we engage with our communities when we're going to deliver infrastructure. And it was really interesting actually. Then when we went out and we started talking to kind of local community, we realised actually they had quite a lot of interest in the project. Some of it was concerns, some of it was positive, and some of us actually just wondering about what this meant, and trying to make people bring them on this journey of this is to connect renewable energy. This is what our targets are and what that would mean for their area. And I suppose initially there was, as I said, there was some concerns about this, and it's probably what a lot of engineers might face when they're delivering infrastructure projects. And you engage with the community. First is you need to explain what the need of the project is, but then also listen and take on board that feedback, and what the community asked us was, could we look at some of the other options? And some of the options we had ruled out because they were maybe more technically challenging or had maybe more environmental management for us to contend with. We did get that commitment. We said, we'll go back and look at it. So through, I suppose, a period of maybe 12 months, we looked at other options that were available. Some of them, we still realised, but there was one that we said, look, actually, we might be able to take this further. And we had a look at that. And bearing in mind, there's, you know, wind farms that are waiting to connect into it. So there's still a need to progress the project and keep momentum going. But ultimately, what we were able to do as a project team through engaging with our oncologists. With geotechnical engineers, with electrical engineers, we did come up with another option, and we were able to move the substation further away. And I think overall, when it went into the planning system itself, what I found really interesting was there wasn't a single objection to the project. In fact, I actually, you know, actually got a letter of support from that community for the engagement that we'd had on the project. And what it really taught me was, you know, as an engineer, you can have the most perfect plan on paper, but unless you actually meaningfully engage with your stakeholders and communities, that's maybe where that plan will stay, possibly is on paper. And actually, you know, it's one that I took away, and I've learned a lot from that experience.

Dusty Rhodes  15:40 
Louise, let me ask you a little bit about yourself. How did you get into engineering in the first place? You've got a great passion for it.

Louise O'Flanagan  15:48 
I think that, I think that passion has developed over the last 20 years of being an engineer. It was certainly not something that I had ever considered when I was in secondary school, it was a teacher of mine, and she recommended it to me. She said, You know, you're good at maths. You really like science. I know you'd like a profession and you want to help people. Would you consider engineering? And I said to her, No, I've never considered it. I'll go find out more. And it probably wasn't that I constantly said, I you know, I wouldn't be an engineer, but I just didn't know anybody. I didn't know any previous, past pupils that I'd gone on to study engineering. I didn't know anybody's sister that had gone on the engineering I definitely knew some of my friends' brothers had gone on. And so maybe just on some level, I just hadn't considered it as a career path. And then when I got it, I applied to to a number of different colleges, and I got offered a place in UCD. And even when I got there, I wouldn't say it was a passion for it. You know, it's quite overwhelming when you start in engineering, because there's so many different subjects, it's a really broad area to study. But what I found was, in particular, there was this one project that really stood out for me. It was called biosystems for engineering, and it's quite different. And I know it just clicked it when I said I really like this, and I'd like to study more subjects like this. So I looked at what were my options you have to in second year, pick where you might go next. And I realized that the lecturers for those particular subjects were mostly in civil engineering in RSF, terrorists. So that's how I decided to pursue a career in civil engineering in particular. And even as I went through my studies in civil engineering, I kept going towards those subjects that are in the environment were around water hydrology, water treatment, around infrastructure, and that's what ignited that passion in me. So I really just kind of made sure that I kind of followed my own path through to come out with something that I was really interested in,

Dusty Rhodes  17:39 
And you were just exposing yourself to or you were being exposed to lots of different things, and you just followed what interested you. So what was it then that drew you into the energy space?

Louise O'Flanagan  17:49 
Well, initially I started in the water sector, and I spent nine years working as an engineering consultancy in the UK. In Ireland, I worked in with different local authorities around Ireland. I spent a year in Mayo, and me working on different projects of Wicklow and Waterford. And in about 2011 in 2010 I could see that there was really with the economic downturn, going to be a delay in a lot of those projects moving forward. And I was looking around what next is Ireland's biggest challenge? And that's when I happened to cross what Ireland, what ergrid were doing, and it just, once again, just resonated with me, this idea that engineers could bring about solutions and to be part of that solution that need for new infrastructure, and I had a lot of experience in delivering for the water sector, that I could bring their transferable skills over to the energy sector. And that's where I've stayed now for the last 13 years, and that's where my passion is, that idea that you can leave a very sustainable legacy, a very positive legacy, in what you're doing as an engineer.

Dusty Rhodes  18:50 
You mentioned that when engineering was suggested to you, you didn't know any of your own cohort who had gone for it, but you knew some people's brothers and whatever had gone for it, something that you're very passionate about is women in engineering, in your role at the moment, what is the important thing about the shortage of female engineers in Ireland?

Louise O'Flanagan  19:09 
I think firstly, there is a shortage of engineers in Ireland, and then there is definitely a shortage of female engineers in Ireland. I think this is just six hour that about 23% of engineers coming out of university are female, and that drops significantly to about 12% actually entering into the workforce. So but there's huge programs to try and encourage young girls and women into STEM subjects such as engineering. You know, employers such as EirGrid Take a very positive view of trying to encourage engineers to take to encourage women to take up engineering as a profession. In fact, we have a very active graduate program where you'd see, maybe, you know, 50% of our graduates are female, and to try and support that, but it is certainly a stark figure I'd like to. Think that you know other people might follow maybe a similar path that I have, or see that it can be done. I actually heard someone at a conference recently saying you can't be what you can't see. So if you don't see someone that has gone on to take up a more senior role in an organization or as an engineer, if you're maybe earlier in your career, it might not be such a clear path for you.

Dusty Rhodes  20:23 
Now, a lot of people might be looking at you because you're the first female as the Head of Engineering in EirGrid. What does that mean to you?

Louise O'Flanagan  20:30 
I'd like to think once again, there's a there's an opportunity to be a role model and to show that you can take up a senior level position, a senior leadership position within an organisation that is technical. I don't need to have all the technical experience. I need to make sure that I have technical experts in their field as part of that team, and that will be made up, you know, of people that have different disciplines, and diversity is key to it. It's not like you just want to say it's just gender. It's about really supporting diversity on a team, and that's where that collaboration and that different perspectives is really born out. But certainly, I think being female Head of Engineering and asset management does show that you know, this is something that is achievable. If you want to go down this route and go into a leadership role or go into a management role, but still have a technical aspect to to your to your career. And what

Dusty Rhodes  21:26 
Do you think holds women back from careers in engineering in general?

Louise O'Flanagan  21:29 
I think for maybe, maybe for some girls and women, it's like what I went back to at the start, if there isn't a significant number maybe going forward from your class, or that you don't know a lot of your peers that are going forward, you might not, maybe consider it as an obvious choice. So that's why I think the Steps program is really good. And then you know, when you go then through university, as to where do I go next? And I think that's really good if you're coming out of university, is go which employers are the ones that are actually promoting diversity, that are actually genuine and incredible about offering up diversity in the workplace, and the numbers speak for themselves. And as I said, it is challenging, with only 23% of graduates actually being female to make sure that then that organisation encourages female participation in the workplace. Then there's other stages of life that might become more difficult, with families, et cetera, or people having caring roles, and that can disproportionately affect women. But certainly, I'd like to think that if you've, you know you've if that's something that you want to achieve and you want to go on, then you will find the right balance, and there are good employers out there that will support you in that.

Dusty Rhodes  22:34 
I love how you use the word diversity, because you need people of different backgrounds, different skills, different education, different nationalities, different genders, is just another thing on that list. Like, you know, if you were speaking to a female engineer, and I'm sure you probably do, who's feeling a little stuck in her career, and it's kind of, what advice do you give them?

Louise O'Flanagan  22:58 
I think it's for me, it's by finding that passion, what do you enjoy doing, and then finding a balance to make it work for you, if you have a clearer idea where you want to go, and you can see a path, or maybe there's someone just that little bit ahead of you on that path, and then you can get they turn to them and ask them for advice, ask them for feedback. And also, it's not that men don't have a role to play. I think men are very supportive of encouraging diversity and current aging, encouraging gender diversity, and supporting women to going on further in their careers. And it's about normalizing the fact that in those caring roles, it might also be, you know, a man that has to take on his caring roles. And it's just normalizing it for everyone. I think that's a really positive part of it. But certainly, if, if there was a woman joining my team, and I do have a few, I would certainly say, go for what ignites the past in you. Go follow that. You might have to take a little break here and there as other commitments come up in your life, but just try and find a way back in if that's something that you want to do.

Dusty Rhodes  23:58 
And that's just brilliant advice in in general to anybody, I think is something that I've definitely found to be true in my own life, my own career. I want to get back to EirGrid, because I'm thinking about what you said earlier, about many of the projects that you're working on at the moment, or, sorry, many of the projects which are being worked on at the moment, because you don't generate the electricity. You just get it from A to B. There's a lot of wind, solar sites that are being located. And you've mentioned the west of Ireland a number of times. What plans does air grid have to improve how we're getting power from the west of Ireland to the east coast, where the majority of the population are, or to anywhere else in the country, you know what I mean?

Louise O'Flanagan  24:41 
Yeah, no. So, as I mentioned before, when we looked at what the government targets were initially of 70% and onto the 80% we knew that we needed to create a plan of how we were going to achieve that. And there was a roadmap put in place, which is called shaping our electricity future. As I mentioned previous. And we had a huge amount of engagement with industry, with stakeholders, with communities, with local authorities, to explain what the need was and how, what did they think we could do to achieve that? And part of that is what's called a plan led approach so that synergy between where do we have capacity on the grid and where could we place renewables? Or where do we where should we consider demand? So it's really, once again, using that grid in a smarter way than just saying, Okay, we'll just keep building in the one place and try and build more grid to get it from A to B. Is say, well, actually in location C, we have capacity there. And so why? You know that would be a really clear thing. Let's say, What about considering locating wind farms or solar farms or offshore wind in that location, because that's currently where we have capacity on our grid, and then also signaling that this area actually does need reinforcement. We will need to build grid here to support that. And that will take some time, and this is our timeline to do it. It's also about looking at the technologies that I mentioned previously and deploying them throughout different parts of the grid to try and make it work differently. So it's looking at the grid is one thing. It's not separate grids. It's one grid for the whole island, so to see how that operates all together. And so a huge amount of growth on the East Coast, and as you mentioned, we have renewables on the west coast, but what I see as a major step change is offshore wind, because that's now located on the east coast. And you know, there's, you know, maybe three to four gigawatts of offshore wind being planned at the moment for the east coast of Ireland, and that's right off the coast of Dublin. So I think that really is a big change of where we can see generation, renewable generation right on our doorstep. For those that live in Dublin, it's not going to mean that we don't need the other onshore wind that's going to be built in other locations, or the solar energy that's going to be built maybe in the south or other areas, such as the South Coast, for offshore which we need it all. But it's around that. How do we plan it out better in that systematic way?

Dusty Rhodes  27:01 
And it's a very doable thing, because you only have to go on your holidays and realize how big other countries are. And then you come back to our little rock just on the precipice of the Atlantic, and you kind of go, if I drive for more than three hours, I'm going to drown. So it's going to be, it sounds like a huge project. Go West Coast to East Coast, but when you think about it anyways, that's that's a whole other thing. Listen. Louise, I wanted to ask you about, like a lot of engineers, listen to the podcast, who are working in very various engineering firms around the country. You have their ear at the moment. What would you like to say to them in relation to their work and air grid and connecting with air grid, or planning to work with air grid, and what's coming in the next few years?

Louise O'Flanagan  27:50 
Well, I think probably what I've outlined to you just, you could probably imagine there's, there's quite a considerable amount of work in transforming air grids, power system, you know, for generations to come. And this isn't going to be something that's delivered tomorrow or the year after, so we need a huge number of professionals to join us in that challenge. So it could be engineers, ecologists, planners. So, you know, I think if anybody was listening and they wanted to be part of that story, that they're interested in that journey that we're going on look, that are interested in the like sustainability and leaving a very positive legacy. And actually, you know, I talk to people from around the world, and it's really interesting, the number of people that I talk to, of engineers, are saying, I want to make a positive difference, particularly around climate change, and they see this as one of the biggest global threats that we have. And they look at Ireland, they look at air grid, and they tell me, what you're doing there is so transformational that it's so different, that they want to come and join us and be part of that. So maybe that's what I would say. If anybody is listening and they think that's something that they'd like to contribute to or be part of that, I'd maybe suggest even check out our website. We've lots of lots of roles there that might be of interest. But even just to find out more about what we're doing and reach out, even if you're in a community that maybe sees one of our projects coming nearby, are there any particular qualities of skills that you're looking for. At the moment, we're certainly looking for lots of different skills, and it's not even just engineering, but certainly electrical engineering, mechanical, civil process, environmental. You know, I think engineers certainly have a way of thinking and problem solving that lends itself to what we're trying to do. So it's not just one type of engineering, one discipline, but also, as I mentioned, there's other professionals that we need, and then obviously there's other supporting professions that we have. You know, we've solicitors working for us. We have people that work in finance. Our IT sector is massive, and even when you look at where the grid of the future might go, you know, technology plays a massive part of that, of it and AI, so there's, there's plenty of opportunity there. It's not one profession that's ever going to deliver this on its own. You know, it's, it's going to be a whole diverse range of skills that we need.

Dusty Rhodes  29:50 
Looking back on your career, was there any particular incident or story where you learned, like, a big life lesson and just kind of. Wow, and it's stood to your benefit since,

Louise O'Flanagan  30:03 
That's a really good question. Dusty, I think, look, I think in my experience, over the last, you know, as I said, the last 30 years, particularly in project management, what I've learned is about planning for, you know, risks that are unplannable. It's, it's like, you can have a really good schedule, you know, you're going to deliver a project by x date, and then suddenly something comes out of the blue and it throws those plans into disarray. And I think what I've learned over time is just, you know, it's, it's planning for those maybe foreseeable risks, and then having that contingency for the unforeseeable, the unknown. And I think, you know, engineers and project managers tend to be more optimistic and are outlook. If we were pessimistic, we probably wouldn't try and do anything. So you tend to probably err on the side of optimism, and you need to get and that's part of the leadership, although project management is one part. But leadership is getting people to buy into what you want to deliver, and to want to help you and assist you in that. And you know, it's not that you're lying, is that you actually want to drive that on yourself and bring people along. So I think it's about what I've learned is probably having a certain amount of contingency and a plan B if you don't end up doing what Plan A was and being able to keep that momentum going without mentioning any names or places or years.

Dusty Rhodes  31:24 
What happened with that?

Louise O'Flanagan  31:30 

You learned that lesson, and I think it probably even goes back to that, that previous example that I gave you, because I would have thought that I would have gone in maybe with the with the exact plan that I had on paper in a very short period of time and come out with the decision from onboard canola in next many months. I probably would have, even at that stage, probably factored in even a more prolonged planning decision. You know, maybe would have gone to oral hearing. But actually, by doing it the other way around, by spending the time in that development phase prior to going for planning that took a lot longer, that took a year extra onto that project. Was just quite a long time. But actually, on the other side, it saved a huge amount of time because it gave certainty, and that was the point. We came out the other side with a decision that had no conditions, and it was able to go forward. So I think for me, it's about putting a lot of effort into the planning stage and leaving room for that contingency. So that's a project that I was thinking of in particular where, you know, it may set you back in one way, but you actually end up making the time up and giving that greater certainty for things to move forward.

Dusty Rhodes  32:39 
It's been absolutely fascinating and inspiring chatting with you Louise. If you'd like to find out more about Louise and some of the topics that we did speak about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Louise O'Flanagan, Head of Engineering and Asset management at EirGrid, thank you so much for joining us.

Louise O'Flanagan  32:55 
Thank you very much. Dusty.

Dusty Rhodes  32:58 
If you enjoyed our podcast today, please do share it with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For advance episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie.

Until next time for myself Dusty Rhodes, thank you so much for listening. Take care.

Engineering is a diverse and exciting career that fosters immense creative thinking, but just how far can it take you?

Today we hear from an engineer who turned their wildest dreams into reality and took them all the way to NASA. We hear how an opportunity to attend Space Camp inspired their ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude and how engineering has supported further creative pursuits in different disciplines.

Our guest is a trailblazer in the aerospace engineering industry, but also in promoting the idea that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. She is Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, Sinéad O’Sullivan.
 

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• Early experiences that foster a ‘nothing is impossible’ attitude
• The impact of surrounding yourself with inspiring people
• Mission design and AI at NASA
• Parallels between engineering and other creative pursuits
• The role of AI and automation in the future of engineering

 

GUEST DETAILS
Sinéad O'Sullivan is an Aerospace Engineer. She formerly led strategy at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness with Professor Michael Porter and is currently a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology. Formerly a Research Fellow at MIT’s College of Computing and MIT Sloan as well as a Human Spaceflight mission designer for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology, innovation, geopolitics, and national security. She sits on the board of the European Space Policy Institute, is a frequent contributor to the Financial Times, and is Board Member of IMMA - the Irish Museum of Modern Art. She was also recently nominated as a fellow of Engineers Ireland.

Connect with Sinéad on LinkedIn

 

MORE INFORMATION
Come meet the Engineers Ireland Team at the National Ploughing Championships from September 17th to 19th and have a blast at our Space Station.

We will have three incredible experiences at the Engineers Ireland 'Space Store', ran by former NASA Engineer Steve Ringler - who will be down at the Ploughing Championships with our team.

You can immerse yourself in the cosmos with virtual reality adventures using state-of-the-art headsets, try on a replica spacesuit, or get a hands-on experience with real space rocks, including pieces of the moon.

Join us at Block 2, Row 11, Stand 169 for an unforgettable journey through space and engineering.

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer.

Sinead's book “Good Ideas and Power Moves” is due to be published in September 2025.

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

 

QUOTES
"I got to spend time with the engineers at NASA, and it just put this very kind of human, normal person face on this career that seemed totally inaccessible." - Sinéad O’Sullivan.

"There are a ton of really smart engineers that are solving these problems at any given time. But the problem really, I think, lies with the bureaucracy of how we fund science, how we create policy around that." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"I feel like to be creative, you have to let that child part grow up with you, like if you really want to be good at doing these types of jobs, don't let people tell you they're dumb ideas." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"To be a great engineer, you need to be around great engineers." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"My entire career has been curiosity-driven for the simple reason that if I'm really interested in it, I'm going to work hard enough at it to be successful in it." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

"Engineering is really about learning a way of thinking, and it's one that allows you to understand nuance, complexity, and difficult challenges that you can apply to literally any other career." - Sinéad O’Sullivan

 

KEYWORDS
#engineering #nasa #career #space #mission #taylorswift #robots

 

 

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription:

 

Dusty Rhodes  0:00 
Right now on Amplified, how ordinary engineers achieve extraordinary things.

Sinead O'Sullivan  0:06 
If you're an engineer, you can do anything else, and it nearly makes you a better thing. So for example, maybe I want to do law, but I really am excited about engineering. I would say, do engineering, because guess what, engineers ultimately make better lawyers. Learning engineering is really about learning a way of thinking, and it's one that allows you to understand nuance, complexity, difficult challenges that you can apply to literally any other career. I can do anything with my engineering degree.

Dusty Rhodes  0:37 
Hello there. My name is Dusty Rhodes. Welcome to Amplified, the Engineers Journal podcast. A lot of engineering is thinking about what is possible and then setting out to make it a reality. Our guest today is an expert at doing this because she has pushed the envelope of engineering literally to its limits. As a teenager in Armagh, she decided that she wanted to work with NASA and spent many years there working on models to understand which mission design from a possible million would be the one best one today. As well as working on AI and how some tech platforms are more powerful than countries, she's also found time to set up a record company, work in a two-star Michelin restaurant and study for a diploma and wine. So if you're thinking, ‘how do I make my career dreams come true’ I think our guest today is going to have a few answers and a little inspiration for you. It's a pleasure to welcome Sinead O'Sullivan. Sinead, how are you?

Sinead O'Sullivan  1:28 
I'm great. Thank you so much for having me

Dusty Rhodes  1:33 
Let me start off with I mean, your career is just a dazzling array of accomplishments. Can you just kind of bring me back to the start and tell me the story of how your journey began into aerospace engineering? 

Sinead O'Sullivan  1:46 
Yeah, I mean, I was really, really lucky when I was younger that I got to go to space camp in Houston. They have an international camp. And so it's, it's kind of, it's something like 4045, students from 3036 different countries attend every year, and I was lucky enough to go and represent Northern Ireland, and I got to spend time with the engineers at NASA. And it just put this very kind of human, normal person face on this career that seemed totally inaccessible. And I remember coming back and telling people that, yeah, I want to be a neuroscience engineer, and so I'm going to work at NASA. And they would look at me as if I had three heads, but I had met very normal people who had done it, and it was no big deal for them. So I kind of thought, Well, why can't I do that too?

Dusty Rhodes  2:40 
The following, with NASA. You get the gig with NASA. I mean, there's very, from my limited knowledge of NASA, they're either talking about going to the ISS the International Space Station, going to the moon or going to Mars. Which one of these were you involved in? 

Sinead O'Sullivan  2:54 
So I actually did human spaceflight mission design. So anything that involves, I mean, very simply, there's human and then non-human, you're kind of robotic mission design. I was involved in the planning of anything that was that involves humans in the loop. So if there was an astronaut involved in some capacity, that would have fallen into my my bracket. And, yeah, there were a couple. I mean, you know, any given time we were designing, you know, maybe upwards of 10 different missions. Now, not all of those missions would make it through to being fully funded and something that we would actually work on, but we would look at lots of, you know, kind of like, you know, ideate, lots of different types of missions, and then some would get further along. So for example, the mission to Mars is one that you know, is quite famous and has made it very far along in its trajectory. There were a couple that I worked on that unfortunately did not make it as far along. One of them is, is what was known as the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is where a close fly by asteroid would be captured by this kind of robotic arm type thing as it went past the Earth's atmosphere, and it would be brought then into lunar lunar orbit, a retrograde orbit, so just an orbit around the moon, and we would then send humans back and forth to that asteroid for mining purposes. Now the reason for that being that we would get to test a lot of the mining equipment that we wanted to send to Mars in a much closer and safer way than sending it to Mars and hoping for the best, and because we also wanted to test some other human-related mission components that were safer done closer to Earth, on the moon rather than Mars. Yeah. I mean, very interesting set of projects. And NASA is doing a lot of very interesting work at any given time. And sorry, you mentioned earlier that I chose the best mission out of a million statistically. And so a lot of the work that I did. Was kind of looking at the statistics and the number of combinations of different types of missions, and trying to optimise for the overall mission design. And you're looking at hundreds of trillions, not a million. And so it becomes this, you know, we would use supercomputers to try and optimise one small part of this that and the code on that supercomputer might take five days to run, and then you realise you're a bug on day four, and you restart it. But yeah, very exciting types of work that NASA's doing, I got to play a very small role in.

Dusty Rhodes  5:35 
You mentioned mining on an asteroid a great distance away from us, and it kind of almost brings that back to engineering here on Earth, because, you know, you're thinking about Greenfield sites and brownfield sites, and nothing is more Greenfield than an asteroid. It's completely barren. I mean, do you have the same kind of problems, if you like, from a different perspective? But are they at the core of them? Are they the same problems that regular engineers have?

Sinead O'Sullivan  6:07 
Well, I mean, NASA engineers are regular engineers. We kind of put these people on pedestals and make it seem like it's impossible to do what they're doing. I mean, they're just regular people that went to university and got a job and have families and go to work nine to five. You know, now, the problems that they work on are a little more abstract, because they're not testing it every day. You know, they might test it once or twice in their career, if they're lucky. I mean, if you look at the Mars Rover, for example, curiosity and endeavour. I mean, you know, I got to spend time with those engineers as they were testing it live. I was in mission control as that landed. I mean, you know, seeing the face of engineers after they've worked on something 24/7, for eight years straight, and then it works. I mean, that's amazing. But these, I mean, they're still, these are very normal people doing normal engineering jobs. Um, one of the closest analogies I would have with, and I did a lot of kind of underwater robotics work for the US Navy. A lot of anyone that's working with water is essentially working with a very similar environment to space. You've got very high-pressure, temperature differentials. Stuff moves like just, it sounds simple but like, stuff just moves in ways that you kind of is hard to control. It's hard to see. Like, sensors don't work that well. So like, if you're you know, if you have this underwater robotic and you're trying to find something to shear, there's glean. Sensors just don't work that well. Everything gets wet, everything gets hot or really cold. So like the closest analogy to kind of an on-Earth environment would definitely be underwater, which is why so many of the astronauts that you see graduating from NASA's astronaut programs have come from institutions like Woods Hole, which is kind of ocean oceanographic research centre. But, yeah, no, these engineers are, are regular engineers. They're, they're building, they're building very normal stuff. And there's a reason that JCB is one of the larger lunar mining research kind of institutions, you know, these, these are not totally abstract. Some of it feels very abstract.

Dusty Rhodes  8:22 
Sure, but yeah, so engineers at NASA are like engineers all over the world. Okay, very intelligent, very curious. People always looking for a solution. The problems that get thrown at you are, as you say, abstract or unusual, but the problem processing, solving problems, your thought process, the method is the same. So can you give me an example, then, of a problem that you were given where you would have used the same method to figure it out?

Sinead O'Sullivan  8:49 
I can give you dozens. I mean, what, you know, what my specialisation was actually in. I came from a kind of world-renowned centre, Academic Centre which created engineering methodologies. And so the methodologies that we would use at NASA were exactly the same engineering methodologies that were used for Boeing, creating, designing aircraft. You know, I have classmates I went to Queen's University in Belfast, and I have classmates that went on to work for spirit of shorts in Belfast. They worked for Airbus. They would use the same methodologies, except the difference is that we would get to test ours slightly less often, and it would be a lot more kind of hypothetical, which is why, and sorry, the budgets for ours were extremely different. You know, the budget for a spaceflight program is infinitely larger than, I shouldn't say infinitely larger, but it's significantly larger than most kind of Earth-constrained problems. So you know, I'd say the big difference is that you have to get really, really creative in how you think about testing some of the. Stuff. You spend a lot of time modelling how you think things are going to react, the behaviour, the interaction between, you know, different levels of gravity, or, you know, you spend a lot of time modelling components and how they might interact. And then you hope to God that those models work because you've, you've just built a whole thing around that there's less of a feedback loop. So that's probably the big difference with a lot of the stuff.

Dusty Rhodes  10:26 
But what about that? You say you need to get creative. How do you get creative with these problems?

Sinead O'Sullivan  10:30 
Going back to this, the Space Camp thing, I went to mentor, and to be one of the kind of, yeah, the mentors at space camp, and you have these 16-year-olds, and they're kind of throwing out ideas like, why don't we just do some Hyperloop, kind of magnetic, you know, launch system? And you're thinking, or, I don't know if that's, you know, okay, sure. Why not? Or a space elevator or something like that, and you kind of think that doesn't seem very realistic or practical. But then several years later, you hear in the news that there is now a company that's being funded with hundreds of millions of dollars to do these things. And so one of the most amazing things about the space and the aerospace industry, I find, is that it actually really helps you to not lose that sense of anything is possible that you have at a young age, because it is literally and, you know, I spend so much time with people at NASA and the GERD propulsion lab and other really cool places and they spitball ideas as if they're five years Old. Like, why don't we just do this? And the adult in you says, well, budget, Paul, you know, there's a there's 10 million different reasons why that's not going to work. But you have to really, really restrain yourself and say, Actually that forget about all of those kind of other reasons the technology and that could actually work. So then you realise is the problem with a lot of our science R and D, actually, the inability to get the politicians on board, the financing on board, and that's kind of the direction that I moved in with my career because I realised that there are a ton of really smart engineers that are solving these problems at any given time that we have. But the problem, really, I think, lies with the bureaucracy of how we fund science, how we create policy around that. And it's like, if we could just give money to these people that are like, Let's build a space elevator without thinking about the technological or the other kind of constraints we would probably have 16-year-olds building really sophisticated solutions to problems that we've been trying to solve for a really long time. So I kind of feel like to be creative, you have to like as you get older, right? And you're gonna know this, everyone feels it the child, in you get smaller and smaller and smaller. The child that would have said, just do this or that, but you have to kind of let that child grow up with you, like if you really want to be good at doing these types of jobs, don't let people tell you they're dumb ideas.

Dusty Rhodes  13:18 
Another part of that is going to make a bigger impression, I think, in the future. And you must have had experience of this is robots and automation, because obviously you can't send humans to asteroids or to Mars or, you know, hopefully we're going back to the moon. But robot, and I've seen a lot of stuff where they're talking about building a base on the moon, but it will be built by automated robots before a single man or woman lands there. And I find that's amazing. Have you gotten involved in this? Have you?

Sinead O'Sullivan  13:47 
I haven't done anything specifically on lunar construction, but I did a lot of work on autonomous systems.

Dusty Rhodes  13:54 
Yeah, that's what I was talking about robots and automation. Yeah, tell me more.

Sinead O'Sullivan  13:58 
I mean, it's just, it's really incredible. I, you know, we live in an interesting period at the minute, because I spent many years working on kind of robotics and autonomous systems, um, and now we're at the stage where the difference between an autonomous system, the work that it can do, the constraints that there are in, in how we should expect these systems to work, and kind of societal expectations of an understanding of these systems are not that well understood. So, so. So, for example, there are two types of people generally, and people will kind of fall into one of these two categories. You're either somebody who thinks never gonna happen, how could, how could a robot do something that humans do? And even AI. But let's stick with robots and automation, autonomous systems for a minute, and then there are people who think these things are gonna do everything, and they're gonna kill us, and they're gonna kill everyone. And people typically fall very quickly into one of these two categories. You know, having built some of the most sophisticated autonomous systems for the Department of Defense, particularly as I mentioned underwater - I spent quite a bit of time working underwater, which is the hardest environment you could build a system in because it doesn't ever really know where it is because things move constantly under water. GPS, oh my god GPS does not work underwater. How do you locate yourself if you have a system of three different robots and they're trying to do something together, how do they know where each other is? Because of the refraction of water itself, it's actually very hard to do this quickly. One of the hardest things to do is to get underwater systems to communicate with each other. And there's a lot we can learn from underwater autonomous systems that can help us understand how autonomous cars communicate with each other when there's high traffic. There's a lot of really exciting stuff happening there. I want to ask people, whatever bucket they fall into, either 'Oh it's going to fix everything' or  'it's going to kill us all', to kind of have some restraint there and look at where they're really good at what they're doing and where they're just not as good. I kind of like to think of autonomous systems as a tool that humans use, never in a full replacement capacity, but that we can use to make our lives better and easier. That helps us in some capacity, but not in a full replacement mode and certainly not in a robot that has super-intelligence of itself that is going to kill us all. 

Dusty Rhodes  17:07 
I definitely want to dig into more about that because robots, automation, AI and all in that bucket is something I want to dig in with you about. But first, just a quick mention that if you're listening to the podcast and you're kind of thinking that this whole space exploration and everything just sounds amazing, and you're thinking to yourself what it would feel like to get into a rocket ship and go off to space, well, here's an invitation to come to the Engineers Ireland Team, at the National Ploughing Championships, September 17th-19th, because we have got our very own Engineers Ireland Space Station on-site! There's going to be three incredible experiences there for you in the Space Store, which is run by former NASA Engineer Steve Ringler, who will be down at the Ploughing Championships with out Team. Immerse yourself in the cosmos with virtual reality adventures using state-of-the-art VR headsets, you can try on a replica space suit - that's top of my list, or you can get a hands-on experience of real space rocks, including actual pieces of the moon. To do that, just join us at Block 2, Row 11, Stand 169 for an unforgettable journey through space and engineering. Find out more here!

Dusty Rhodes  18:19
Sinéad I can see you making a note, is it about the Ploughing Championships? 

Sinead O'Sullivan  18:23
It absolutely is. It's very exciting, it's very, very cool, the space suit in particular, I spent a long time working with Space Suit designers and material engineers, oh my god they're just unbelievably complicated. I remember trying on my first space suit when I was younger and that had probably the biggest impression on me because you forget how hard it is of an environment on humans and you've got this one thing that protects you and they're just so unbelievably cool, but complicated things. So definitely go and look at the space suit.

Dusty Rhodes  19:09
Sinéad I want to move on and just ask you about how you think about life, because working for NASA is a lofty ambition, and you were talking about the kid inside you and the kid goes 'yeah of course you can!' A lot of us lose that as we get older. But you've gone and done that and worked at NASA, and I'm sure a lot of us would be like 'we'll I'd love to be a wine expert', you've done all these things I mean you're writing books, let me know how is it that when your brain works when you get a creative idea in your head you go from crazy idea to actually doing it and achieving it?

Sinead O'Sullivan  19:48
Yeah, that's an interesting question, I mean, I think you've kind of answered it in your question. And I've kind of discussed it before but like I'd say if there was something I've learned when I was younger, maybe 16 / 17, when I feel like I was making career decisions that stayed with me, is that I met people who did extraordinary things and they were just ordinary people and I think there's something about that that made me internalise the idea that there's literally nothing that you cannot do. My friends have just done amazing stuff and I see them on their journey and they're not easy things to do like you have to have grit, determination and resiliency, but nothing feels like it's impossible for me. It's not necessarily an ego thing, I am never the smartest person in a room and I didn't get the best grades in school, and people probably laughed at me when I said I was going to NASA, because I was never the top of my class. And you know, normal people can do extraordinary things. At a young age if you develop agency like 'I can go and do those things', sure it might take you a while to figure out how to do them, but nothing feels impossible. One you realise that the hard part is actually figuring out what thing you want to do if you could do anything, because there are so many things to do. And so the hard part is waking up every day and thinking 'what do I really want to dedicate the next month, six months, year, five years, to doing what is the goal?' And once you've decided on the goal, I mean, it really is just a matter of going and doing it and sticking at it.

Dusty Rhodes  22:13 
A lot of a lot of engineers will have dreams, as we all do, and they say, I want to buy, build the first, you know, 50-story skyscraper in Ireland or I want to run my own firm, or I want to do something, you know, you know, crazy at the in the middle of the Atlantic, or whatever, and they have the you kind of just get stuck in a rut, and you don't move on. I've heard two things that I have found to be true, and I just want to ask you if you found them be true. Number one is, you have those crazy ideas and you think, okay, great, I'm going to do it. All right, you should try and hang out with the people that you want to be like. So if you want to be a millionaire, hang out with millionaires. All right? And the other thing is, is that when you start hanging out with the people that you want to be like they're more giving because they're ahead of you. And it's just a natural thing in life where kind of, you know, somebody who's climbing up the ladder doesn't want somebody in their way, but somebody who's behind is not important. So you're quite happy to go, oh yeah. Well, listen, if you want to do NASA, here's the thing. You go through the whole, whole steps of them, and you get all that. Have you found that also to be true in your career?

Sinead O'Sullivan  23:23 
Yeah, you've nailed it. I mean, so many people don't understand that 90% of trying to do something hard isn't about the sure you need the technical skills, right? So, like, for engineering is a great example. I can't be an engineer at NASA. If I don't understand maths, like there is a basic requirement, yeah, technically. But I think once you have that, like, how many engineers are there in the world? So many, but not everyone gets to work at NASA. You know, I say that these are ordinary people, but, you know, there are few of them, and it's a very prestigious job. But I think what people don't quite understand, and it took me a really, really long time to understand this, is that most of the stuff that you learn about how to actually get these jobs and do them, is like implicit learning. It's not in a textbook. It's not written down anywhere. It's the kind of stuff that you only pick up. It's a mentality, it's how to go about things, it's how you communicate that you only really learn when you spend time with the people that are doing it. And so there's this kind of insider, outsider perspective, which is hard like it is unbelievably hard to break through, but if you spend time with the people that are doing those things, you don't even realise that you're learning how to be one of those people, and then you wake up one day and you are one of them. And there's so much of the world is about implicit learning, which is why, during COVID, when people stopped going to offices, I felt really bad for younger people, because they're not implicitly learning these things. They might be sitting doing a spreadsheet or using CAD or something, but to be a great engineer, you need to be around great engineers. When you surround yourself with people that you want to be like and you find interesting and, you know it really it's not in a weird or superficial way. I mean, just people that you like, and you find interesting, and you aspire to be, you become one of them over time. I fully believe that we are, you know, we are the sum of the people that we spend the closest amount of time or the most amount of time with. And I'm lucky that I got to travel a lot and meet really cool people all over the world. And I would like to think that I'm a sum of these very cool, interesting people. That's not to say I am cool and interesting, but it's more likely that I will be if I spend time with people like that.

Dusty Rhodes  25:50 
Very, very true. I'm going to hit you now with the strangest twist in an interview that I've ever had in my entire career because we've been talking about career moves. We've been talking about NASA. We've been talking about building crazy things underwater and on remote asteroids and stuff like that. And now we're going to talk about Taylor Swift, oh my gosh. And it's all related to everything that we have been talking about. Okay, because you've written a book called 'Good Ideas and Power Moves'. Link is in the description of the podcast for you. But Taylor Swift almost embodies everything you've been talking about. Tell me about this.

Sinead O'Sullivan  26:29 
I just, I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift music, and I followed her quite closely. You know her kind of personal, unprofessional trials and tribulations. I've seen her as somebody who just does exactly the stuff that I've talked about, and I've always felt really amazed by by somebody like her.

Dusty Rhodes  26:49 
So give me, give me an example of something Taylor did that relates to what we were talking about.

Sinead O'Sullivan  26:53 
I mean, more recently, she re-recorded all of her albums, and literally every executive under the sun. Told her not to do that. She went against a private equity firm with more than a trillion dollars behind it, which told her not to do that, and she still did it. And she there was, I mean, statistically, it was much more likely than not that what she was doing was career suicide, but she just very strongly believed in it, and she had a gut instinct about it, and it worked in her favour for lots of various different reasons. It could easily not have been done, but I just feel like, you know, that is one example of somebody who she still has that child inside of her that says, actually, this is what I want to do, and this is what I'm going to do, and this is what I believe in. And I don't care if the spreadsheets or Wall Street or whoever these, these kind of childless, soulless people tell me that I'm wrong, I'm just gonna go and do it and see what happens. And this is a path that I'm gonna take. I just think she's just incredibly young, fun, courageous, and I just think she's done a lot of really, really interesting stuff. I mean, again, she is someone who against whom the odds have been completely stacked. And she, you know, she wasn't always as successful as she is today. And a lot of people probably don't remember the years when everyone hated her, and a lot of people would have given up and been like, Okay, well, I had a good career so far, I should be thankful for that. And you know, now I'm going to retire because I've made a ton of money, and the time, you know, the time in the limelight is over for me. She didn't do that. She kind of forged her own very, very atypical path. Any executive in the music industry would not have told any of their musicians to do what she did at any given stage of that.

Dusty Rhodes  28:45 
So, would it be true then that Taylor Swift's problem-solving in Taylor Swift, the brain of Taylor Swift, the way it solves problems and the way it makes decisions is something we should learn from.

Sinead O'Sullivan  28:56 
I definitely think so. I, you know, it kind of frustrates me. We were talking earlier about, you know, staying and being creative. And I think that, like not a lot of people for a very long time, took her seriously. I first started to write about Taylor Swift in a more business kind of professional finance capacity several years before, you know, kind of the mainstream, oh, she's amazing and oh, she's making so much money, started to happen. And I remember because I write for the Financial Times, having an argument with my editor there trying to get a piece published about her several years ago. And they said, No, I mean, she's just, you know, she's just a musician, you know, she's just so and so. But the reality is that, and we now know she was never just so and so. She was never just a musician. But getting back to my point, which is that you kind of have to look outside of the box in terms of who's doing something that's really interesting or unique. And don't you know there's in the same way that that adults, part of you will be like, oh, never gonna work bureaucracy, politics, finance, whatever? You have to have that same remove, that same mask when you look at who is inspiring you, or where you find your creativity, a lot of people would for for most of her career, did not take her, did not view her as a serious person, in the same way that most engineers don't go to art museums to try and find you know something that's going to inspire the next NASA mission. But if you want to be creative, you have to look at people just doing weird stuff that is not on this kind of escalator of a career and learn something from that.

Dusty Rhodes  30:42 
One of the things you said at the start of our conversation was it's ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and Taylor Swift is a great example of that because she's just a girl. Where was it Philadelphia, or the state of where she was from? Pennsylvania? Oh, Pennsylvania, that's it. Sorry. So she's from the state of Pennsylvania, small town, Pennsylvania, and, you know, she'd no major, like, you know, her dad wasn't a pop star and like that, but she just came from that, and she had the determination. And many people have seen the video of her sitting as a 14-year-old singing beside some river or whatever, and there was, like, nobody there, all right? And I think the same thing about Ed Sheeran, because he, again, was, he was, I mean, he was a red-headed kid, all right, not blessed with the looks blessing, all right. But he said, I want to be a pop star. And he was a terrible singer when he was a kid.

Sinead O'Sullivan  31:34 
So I love this, yes, I this is my favorite example, and I actually wrote about him in the book. And this is exactly what I refer to, and Taylor Swift writes about it in her lyrics frequently. Yeah, she was never born like this, she had to work so damn hard Yes, to get to where she is today. And I fully believe that, Oh, my God, I was never if you, if you would have asked my maths teacher when I was 15 if I was going to go to NASA, they would have laughed.

Dusty Rhodes  32:03 
Yes, honestly, but if you have that dream and you have that crazy idea, you will then do the work that takes to get there.

Sinead O'Sullivan  32:09 
I believe that, and that's why I, you know, I saw a professor of Aerospace Engineering, and I teach a lot of undergrad engineering, and they kind of all ask me for career advice at certain stages, even after they've kind of long graduated. It's, it's always really nice to hear from from previous students. And they're always kind of, there's, there's a choice that they have to make. Should I do this thing and it's stable, and I know what it and it's a great career, and, yeah, or this other thing. And I was going to say, like, you're asking me this question because you're interested in this other thing. Otherwise, you would have said, No, you would have taken the like, and it's this isn't great advice for everybody, and I acknowledge that you know this. This works for me and it works for a small number of people, but, like, my entire career has been curiosity driven for the simple reason that if I'm really interested in it, I'm going to work hard enough at it to be successful in it. If I'm not interested in it, like there's just no way I'm ever going to be good at it, because I just every there's nothing, nobody is born with a single talent that they're good enough at to get them to the top without trying. And so it's like, what are the things I'm excited about? Because those are the things that I'm going to get off at eight o'clock in the morning and be like, Oh, I can't wait to pick up where I left off yesterday. And so it's like, do the thing that you really love. And when I was younger, I remember, and in Ireland, you know, I think so many people might have experienced this, but if you get good grades, they try to, especially in science, they try to tell you, you should be a doctor, and that's a that's a great job for a lot of people. I just never it. Just never even entered like I just didn't even think about it because I knew I just very specifically. I decided I was going to go wherever NASA and I remember at the time of school being like, okay, cool, but just go and do medicine and I just had no interest. I would have failed. I just would have failed medical school. I just wouldn't have been able to pass it. It would have been too boring for me. Yeah, that it's boring. But for me, I just didn't find it interesting.

Dusty Rhodes  34:24 
But I think it's one of those things where you find the thing, or whatever you go, that's what I want to do. And very, very few people have that. A lot of people, as you say, they go to school and they go to numbers and they get the grades and they go, I'll go be a lawyer, be a doctor, you know, whatever. Be an accountant, you know, whatever. And they make great money, but our their hearts aren't in it. I find most of the engineers that I speak to are not like that, because there was always something about engineering where they kind of went. I love a really good problem. That's why they got into engineering.

Sinead O'Sullivan  34:56 
Yeah, and I worked with a lot of people in finance at the minute and have done for the last few years. And I remember when I went to Harvard Business School, I had gone from working at NASA, where people, I mean, it would be midnight on a Friday night, and I'd be running code, and people would grab a few beers and watch like, you know, it was like a hobby and a job all in one and everyone was super excited about what everyone else was doing. And then I remember going to Harvard Business School and being with a ton of kind of hedge fund, private equity, investment banking type people, and they hated their jobs, and there was no part of them that wanted to ever be in the office. And I remember thinking at the time like, wow, this is the difference between, I mean, an engineer has, like I said, has the ability to make a ton of money in so many different ways that are not engineering. So you can be you can go into accounting, you can go into banking, you can be a doctor, and a lot of the time you'll be pushed into those areas. But you kind of, the engineers are the people who kind of said, I actually don't want to do that. I want to do this other thing. And they're very specific about that thing being engineering. They've chosen engineering, which is why I love working with engineers, because they choose to be there every day when they have alternatives, people that work in finance. And I mean, this is not to say that they're bad or horrible or boring. A lot of people in finance, and they're very cool, but nobody wakes up in the morning as a 15-year-old, and I cannot wait to be an accountant with engineering. You have to, you have to choose that. And there's something so amazing with working with people who are passionate about what they're doing. You can't replace, like there's no there is nothing. There's no amount of money in the world, salary wise, that you can replace working with cool, interested people with.

Dusty Rhodes  36:52 
Describe to me the feeling you get when you're working with cool, interesting people, and you have this enormous problem, and then you come up with an idea. And then you fix it. What's that feeling like when you go it worked?

Sinead O'Sullivan  37:04 
It's priceless to see something that you've built. Work is priceless. And people feel this at a really young age, and this is the thing that they lose, I think, when they get older, this kind of problem solving, because problems get more complex and they get more kind of ethereal, and so many more people are involved in fixing it that no one really takes ownership over it. But when you're a kid, right? And you're building Lego, and the thing works, you know, like, Huh? You know, I've been working with chefs recently, like top chefs at a two-star mission restaurant, I see the same thing. It's engineering. They see it every they build something, and there's a reason that they work 18 hour days, every day, is because they get so much satisfaction from the thing that they made than going and working. There's something about that that just, it's just money. It's like, it's, it's like doing a hobby and getting paid for it. That just doesn't get replicated in finance when your spreadsheet tells you you're gonna make money. You know, there's, there's something so satisfying about building or designing, and even if it doesn't work, because 99% of the time it doesn't work, right? And no one talks about that.

Dusty Rhodes  38:16 
Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Even if it doesn't work, you've always learned something so you know, it's not a failed exercise, by by any accounts. Listen, let me wrap up our conversation just kind of looking to the future, because I think you might have a better idea than most of us. AI and big tech is what everybody is talking about. I'm wondering where what you know of AI is going to help engineers with problem-solving and decision-making. What do you see coming down the line?

Sinead O'Sullivan  38:45 
I will give you a good example in biotech, which is where we kind of seen some of the impacts of AI, actually, even in terms of the type of work that I did at NASA, which is very statistically driven types of work. So let's say you have a needle and a haystack. A lot of the work at NASA that I did was trying to find the needle, which is a mission that was like the optimal mission in amongst the haystack. And we wrote a lot of code, and a lot of the stuff that I did was writing optimisation, and it's kind of a what would kind of now be considered like AI algorithms to try and find that that needle faster and faster and faster, in the same way, that in biotech, you're trying to find chemical solutions to health problems. So let's say that there, you know, there are a trillion different ways that enzymes can work together in a vaccine to do something. Well, it used to be that scientists would have to go through one by one, testing each of these to realise that it worked or didn't work. Now we have AI that can nearly do this in the blink of an eye, where we used to need supercomputers at NASA. I mean, one of my friends at the Jet Propulsion Lab has a side curiosity in in biology and run the code for the COVID vaccine the week that it was released, the week that the paper on that was released, he was able to do that on his home computer and validated that it worked. So we have this kind of shift in the computational ability to do some of the grunt work that people would have done. And I think right now that's where we are, that this has just become such an amazing tool that should, and I think will allow us to say, Okay, I used to spend 18 hours a day for four years trying to get to this point that I was able to get at in three and a half seconds using AI. Now that I'm there, the really hard stuff can start. The hard work really begins, of trying to figure out, how does this vaccine interact with complex systems? Um, how does this mission? How do we get this mission through Congress? How? I mean, the New Yorker just wrote an amazing piece on writing because people are convinced that it's going to kill the work of writers and journalists. And it's like writing is also this kind of combinatorial problem. There are 8 trillion different ways that you can write a sentence. A writer has to specifically choose one, and it's like, what are the constraints? Who is it writing for writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have to think about your readers and what emotions you're trying to convey. So there's this higher level of thinking that an engineer, a writer, a biotechnologist, has to make where they look at the complex world around them, the markets, financing, policy, and that's the part that I think a human is uniquely good at doing, and humans will uniquely do, but they'll just be doing it so much faster and better with the use of tools like AI.

Dusty Rhodes  42:00 
Yeah, so, AI is a good thing in a short sentence.

Sinead O'Sullivan  42:04 
Yes, I, you know, I there are, again, like, like, autonomous systems. People think it's either gonna kill us or make us redundant, or, no, it's a really great tool. And actually, I was giving a talk with the editor of The Economist recently, and he had a really good line, which I'm going to steal here, which is that, you know, chat GPT, for example, people, everyone's talking about chat GPT. Chat GPT is like having an intern. They do a lot of work for you, but you still have to go through to make sure that they didn't screw it off anywhere. Make sure to correct, but that intern is never going to replace the writer or the editor, but it certainly helps them so they're a tool. All of these things that we build are tools. We can decide what we want to do with them. Even, oh, my God, even if there was a runaway rogue AI that tried to kill us all, we can decide to do something about that, because we have agency, right? Like we're not stuck in a vacuum with this stuff happening to us. That's why we have policy and law and regulation. So I I'm not worried about it. I'm excited about it.

Dusty Rhodes  43:12 
I'm excited about it as well. I'm a little bit tin hat about it as well. And another third of me it just keeps thinking about the animal Schwarzenegger movie, The Terminator, where Skynet eventually, yeah, there you go. So, but it's the future, and nobody knows. Listen to wrap-up today. Sinead, it's been absolutely fascinating. Is there anything else, or any final thoughts that you would like to share on engineering and stuff like that with our audience?

Sinead O'Sullivan  43:37 
Yeah. I mean, here's the thing that, you know, I get a lot of younger people asking me if they should do engineering or something, or how to think about, like a career in engineering at that stage. And I guess my guiding principle, because I still make career decisions every day, like even adults have to think about them all the time. And I always think about a couple of things. One is like, am I going to have fun doing this? And I kind of optimise nearly all of my career decisions for fun, because I don't. I don't think jobs have to be boring. That's so dumb. You can having a boring job as a choice, but one that I've never made. The other thing is that I always try to choose something that gives me more optionality. So for example, medicine, my sister's a doctor. There are very few things that she can do that is not being a doctor. Now that she's done her 12 years of training, if you're an engineer, you can do anything else, and it only makes you a better thing. So for example, if you think down the line, maybe, maybe I want to do law like something totally different, right? Maybe I want to do law, but I really am excited about engineering. I would say do engineering because guess what? Engineers, it has been, literally make better lawyers. And I'll tell you one other thing, I'm a friend who was an engineer who went into law. They make way more money if they understand technology, way more money. So there's nearly, you know, I've worked with engineers that have become traders. I can tell you one thing, they're better traders. Engineering, learning. Engineering is really about learning a way of thinking, and it's one that allows you to understand nuance, complexity, and difficult challenges that you can apply to literally any other career. And so it's fun. You can be an engineer, or you can be literally anything else once you have it, but there's no way that you're not going to enjoy the process of becoming it. And I think, at the stage where you don't really know much about what you like and don't like, and careers and jobs and what I had no idea what engineers did like, none, none when I chose to do engineering. But I love the people and everyone fun that I met was always an engineer, and so baby steps, just do what you think is fun and the engineering you can use to double your success in any other career. Should you decide at a later stage that's not what you wanted to do? But yes, I there's, you know, people always ask me, if you could go back and do it again, what would you change? And like, absolutely nothing. I can do anything with my engineering degree.

Dusty Rhodes  46:30 
And on that note, I'm going to say it's been hugely inspirational chatting with you if you'd like to find out more about Sinead O'Sullivan and some of the topics that we spoke about today. You find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast, but for now, Sinead O'Sullivan, thank you so so much for being so giving.

Sinead O'Sullivan  46:47 
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a ton of fun.

Dusty Rhodes  46:51 
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business, just on the search for Engineers Ireland on their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For pre-release episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at www.engineersireland.ie 

Until next time for myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you so much for listening.

Engineering innovation has created incredible technology and found new ways to use current technology to overcome engineering challenges.

LiDAR is an example of one of these revolutionary tools and today we hear from an art historian turned civil engineer who is using it to scan our cities. We hear about their creation of the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the centre of Dublin City, and the challenges they’ve overcome in transforming how we understand, plan, and protect our cities.

Our guest is a pioneering force in urban data science and has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents and worked as a professor in UCD Dublin. She is Professor at New York University's Centre for Urban science and Progress Dr Debra Laefer.

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• Using LIDAR technology to create highly detailed 3D scans of cities
• Developing methods to efficiently store, process, and analyse LIDAR data
• How 3D scans are revolutionising urban flood modelling and emergency response
• Applying the LIDAR data and 3D models to real-world engineering challenges
• Exploring the use of 3D printing technology in conjunction with LIDAR data

GUEST DETAILS
With degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (MS, Ph.D.), NYU (MEng), and Columbia University (BS, BA), Prof. Debra Laefer has a wide-ranging background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation.

In her decade and a half as a faculty member in both the US and Europe, Prof. Laefer has served as the principal investigator for grants from a wide range of sponsors including the National Science Foundation, the US Federal Highway Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Science Foundation Ireland, and the European Research Council (including a €1.5 million single investigator award from the flagship ERC program for which she is the only civil engineer to have been funded in Ireland in the program’s 11 year history).

Prof. Laefer has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications, been awarded 4 patents, and has supervised 15 doctoral and 20 Masters theses. Among many honors from IEEE, ISPRS, and other professional societies, the most notable is perhaps the 2016 commissioning and hanging of her portrait by the Royal Irish Academy as one of eight researchers selected for the Women on Walls project to celebrate Irish women in science and engineering.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debra-f-laefer-09510a11/

 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

 

QUOTES
"We didn't devise a sensor, we didn't even improve the sensor, but we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. We took this more systematic approach of; let's reverse engineer the process, figure out what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data."  - Dr. Debra Laefer

"This technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research. So that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"It's good to make mistakes, and it's good to have senior engineers check them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"As crazy as your idea may seem, a lot of the time the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve, so don't give up on them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

KEYWORDS
#buildings #data #dublin #engineers #civilengineering #lidar #computationalmodel

 

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:00
Right now on AMPLIFIED, we're about to find out how to make a 3D scan of Dublin.

Debra Laefer  00:05
If people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up, that if you push on it hard enough long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem, and a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on it.

Dusty Rhodes  00:24
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. We're very familiar with the BIM and LiDAR in civil engineering but how far can you go with those technologies? Could you apply them to a full city and still get millimetre level accuracy. Our guest today is behind the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the centre of Dublin City. She is a pioneering force in urban data science, addressing the challenge of handling massive amounts of information collected by drones, satellites and laser measurements, and then using smart ways to store search and turn that data into useful visuals. She is a qualified civil engineer, has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents, worked as a professor in UCD Dublin, and is currently serving as a professor at New York University's Centre for Urban science and Progress. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Debra Laefer to the podcast. How are you, Debra?

Debra Laefer  01:24
Great, thanks so much for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:26
It's a delight to have you with us. Before we get into the world's densest LiDAR data set, which you generated here in Ireland, you had a very interesting route into engineering, you had a kind of an art history degree and then got into civil engineering. What, tell me the story behind that.

Debra Laefer  01:43
So I fell in love with painting and old buildings and decided I wanted to become an art historian. So I applied to the best program in the United States and got admitted to Columbia University. And as part of this, I gotten involved with creating a student art gallery. So this was supposed to be a place for students and faculty and alumni could show their own artworks. And then we were informed that we had to temporarily move out of space, because they were going to do construction through it to put in some new telecom lines. So this was back in the mid late to late 80s. And I was concerned because it was a historic building. So I started asking around, started doing some investigation, and found out that not only was the district building, but it had been damaged. In fact, it had been damaged the last time they did construction near it, so called the Landmarks Preservation people to confirm that yes, the building was protected. We reached out to a people at the historic preservation program at Columbia University. And they put me in touch with one of their students who is a civil engineer. And I was so impressed with this, this young woman, her name is Marie Ennis, she's actually still a practising engineer here in New York City. And that she could combine this large toolbox of thoughts and knowledge and conveyed in a way that was meaningful to people in practice. And I was very, I think, influenced by that. And over the next few months, I started thinking, well, if I really love old buildings, maybe this is what I want to do, maybe I need to be come a civil engineer. So there I was finishing my last year in my Bachelors of Arts degree in art history. And starting my first year in my Bachelors of Engineering and civil engineering. And ultimately, I persevered with this, I been worked in the construction industry, at a time where it was it was pretty rough, a lot of organised crime, a lot of violence on the sides. It was a pretty exciting time in New York construction. But I really was happy doing that. And I thought, Oh, well, you know, I feel like I still don't know enough. So we're going to start a master's program at night part time. And as part of that, I met some amazing people in the geotechnical engineering realm. So that's a division of civil engineering. And a lot of them surprisingly, had PhDs. And they were in the midst of really important a lot of amazing technologies from Europe, into the United States, things that were very well suited to protect existing structures when you did excavation or drilling or blasting or de watering, or tunnelling near them. So I finished my master's degree I applied and got a Fulbright to Italy, I spent a year at the Polytechnic of Milan, really studying brick masonry and its vulnerabilities and then I came back to the US, and I took my PhD and Geotechnics. But I had also the opportunity to do some travelling as part of that research. And we went to Korea, and I got a chance to come over to the UK, and to spend some time, particularly some people from McDonald, looking at the Jubilee line. So at the time, this was the most expensive tunnelling project that had ever happened, it was about, I think, 2 billion pounds. And about 25% of this was being spent either on predicting which buildings were going to move, monitoring them, or, you know, kind of free tunnelling intervention where they were pumping grout under the ground, in particular, under Big Bend. And despite this huge investment, a lot of buildings did get damaged. So when we spoke to the engineers, who simply what kind of great computational Shanell models are you using to predict which buildings are going to get damaged, and they said, Oh, we don't use the computational models at home, what's wrong with them? And they said, No, because there's nothing wrong with the model. But we do not have documentation of all of the above ground buildings. Many of these buildings date back hundreds and hundreds of years, and to go out and to survey each building, and then convert to generate drawings. And then to convert that into a computational model would be impossible for the hundreds and hundreds of buildings that are along this tunnel route. So instead, we're using a fairly simplistic set of numerical equations that date back mostly to the 50s, but then kind of improved in the early 70s. So here we are, we're pushing the turn of the millennium. And we're using stuff that's at least 30, if not 40 years old.

Dusty Rhodes  06:53
So that I understand it, you find yourself in London, and you have all of this tunnelling going on, they can't correctly tunnel because they can't do the computations for all of the buildings because it's just too big an area.

Debra Laefer  07:07
It's not that they can't tunnel if they can tunnel but it at greater risk to the structures than need be.

Dusty Rhodes  07:14
So, you said to yourself, aha, here's a problem. I'm gonna come up with a solution for this.

Debra Laefer  07:20
Not quite, I just went home and thought, Wow, I'm surprised this is a problem. Yeah. So I went, I bet back, I finished my degree. And about two, three years later, I had just finished, I had moved to North Carolina to become a young faculty member. And 911 happened. And having spent many years in New York studying and working, having Mitch family there. My parents were born there. My grandparents were born there, many people from our families still live there. It was a very disturbing and moving kind of time. And I was very interested in what they were doing, how they were trying to do the rescuing, because I'd been involved with some kind of post disaster earthquake work while I was also at the university. So it was kind of a little tied into the emergency management community at that point. And I started to learn about a fellow named Dave Bloomquist, who is a faculty member down at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And his work with NOAA, and the work that they did to basically put up a small plane, and to do heat detection and LIDAR over the World Trade Centre disaster zone, so that it could help them both figure out where there might be fires happening underground still, and how to start to remove debris at that point, they already realised that there are no survivors. So but it started looking at these 3d models, or 3d representations using this LIDAR data. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. And about four months later, I was up in New York, and I had an opportunity to work to get to know an engineer who was really helping coordinate a lot of that removal, and had the opportunity to actually go down into the site. So this is like January 2 2002. And the site is still on fire. Even with a gas mask, it was very hard to go through. But I'm looking around and I'm seeing you know, these buildings on the damage and thinking about the work that Bloomquist did, and I said, No, no, maybe we could use LIDAR to document all these structures. So I called him up and he was very generous and he helped share some of experience and help get my group started and we started doing some work in this area. And we started doing some work for the owner Emergency Management Agency. Looking at prediction have trees falling across roadways, where we would go and MIT from the LIDAR they already had, we could measure the height of the tree and the distance to the road and make estimates to what extent if the tree fell over, it would either partially, completely or not at all block the road. So that was kind of our first foray into that. And once I started, I was completely locked.

Dusty Rhodes  10:25
Okay, so now, it sounds like you are looking for data over huge areas of land and very highly populated land, with a lot of buildings in it. That's a huge amount of information that you need LIDAR piqued your attention. For engineers who are not working in this space. Can you explain how that technology works? How do you 3d scan an area?

Debra Laefer  10:48
Yeah, so it's a technology that can be used from multiple platforms from even right now through your iPhone, or from some type of stationary unit, the unit can be mounted on a car, it could be a small lens mounted on drones, on helicopters on airplanes, the technology is fundamentally the same, you're sending out a laser signal, kind of a beam of light, you know, what time it left your piece of equipment.

Dusty Rhodes  11:27
And you know, where kind of in the world your equipment is, is it on the ground? Is it above is it at the bottom of the broad of a craft.

Debra Laefer  11:29
So, that beam part of it will come back, it will hit something and it will come back. And you will know and the equipment will record the time that it comes back. So based on the change in time, we have a certain distance that can be calculated because we know what the speed of light is. And we use that to determine what they call the range.

Dusty Rhodes  11:52
And you were doing this millions and millions. And it's I imagine millions and millions of times a second.

Debra Laefer  11:58
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, obviously some of its limited by your equipment, but it's actually more limited by the how much data the equipment can take back. And how long your battery is good for.

Dusty Rhodes  12:15
Let's put a picture on it. Okay, you somehow found yourself in Dublin and you decided Grafton Street. Okay, we're going to 3d scan that we're gonna measure that down to what kind of measurement Did you get it down to what scale?

Debra Laefer  12:28
The first scan we did was about four centimetres. Wow. Okay. And the second I think was down to about two and a half centimetres. Wow. So tell me maybe a actually even less than that. So made that a centimetre.

Dusty Rhodes  12:47
Tell me about this story about how you use helicopters, drones, whatever centre of Dublin Grafton Street, the whole block and you measured it and 3d scanner to within a centimetre.

Debra Laefer  12:57
So what we really wanted to do was to provide these representations of these buildings to the engineering community. So you have to set your mind back to 2004. Celtic Tiger, Ireland's booming, and a lot of discussion about putting in Dublin's first metro to go from the bottom of Grafton Street, or more specifically, in the northwest corner of St. Stephen's Green, yeah, up to the airport. So Dublin, and Ireland, in general, at that point had had almost no tunnelling. And obviously, here we are in a country that has limited experience with this technology, you have a very complicated geology with a lot of small, granular material mixed in with kind of big boulders and stuff. So it's a tough thing to tunnel through without a lot of disturbance of the ground. And here you have this amazing architectural resource in terms of the centre of Dublin, that at that moment was actually under consideration as a World Heritage Site. So you have this kind of conflict happening about preserving and the future and at risk. So I was fortunate put together a proposal to science foundation Ireland, with a colleague at UC Dublin, Hamish Carr and a colleague up at our collaborator up at Trinity, we were able to come up with kind of a plan of not only how to acquire this data, but how to process it and make it usable.

Dusty Rhodes  14:39
Okay, tell me about acquiring it.

Debra Laefer  14:40
So, when most people even today, put this kind of unit under a plane or a drone or helicopter, it faces down so the unit swings, and depending on the equipment, it might swing thing, just left to right. Or it may have kind of an arc to it. But it's kind of, you know, it's not just capturing exactly what's below it, but kind of a swath, but it's pretty much focused on what's directly underneath. And as the LIDAR unit swings to the side, the quality and quantity of data that you get, when it intersects a building facade is pretty limited. So most of the good data that you're getting is roads, and roofs. But if the thing that you're interested in knowing about and protecting is the building's facade and its structure, knowing about its roof and knowing about the street next to it's not going to help very much. So we kind of took a big step back, and Hamish and I really like, Well, how do we capture these building facades? And we said, well, let's let's think about the equipment, how does the equipment work? And how do they traditionally fly? Even though old kind of medieval city, like Dublin has a kind of pattern to it. And much of it's a grid. So typically, what they do is they say, Okay, we're gonna fly from x to y, and from A to B, this is our kind of area, and they will fly along the grid line, they'll go down, turn around, back down, back. And then when they're finished with that, they'll come around 90 degrees and do it the other way. It's great for the pilots, they really get lost, it's not so great for the data acquisition for the con, we watched you. So we show through geometry that if you flew diagonal, to the street grid, that you could pick up significant like basically double the information, just because the angle, just because the angle, the other thing we realised is that the amount of overlap that they fly was only enough to basically sew together, you know, one group of data from the next. So when you're flying down one street, they would go over, they wouldn't necessarily do the next street, that they would position themselves so that there was only about a 10% overlap. So if you're from the geomatics community, and you're interested in mapping, and you're interested in floodplain, or using this for floodplain risk analysis, this is great. But if you're interested in looking at these facades, it's not so great. And it basically really limits what you can pick up, because it's in that swing at the edge of the scan, that we're picking up the facades, right, because we're looking down, we're looking at the street, and now we're swinging to the left. And only at the end of that swing, do we start picking up the data. So again, we went back to basic geometry, and established that we needed about a 60% overlap, to achieve a complete scan so that we didn't have these is good blank spots, because you have with this line of sight technology, if you can't see it, you can't capture it, like the camera. So you have a situation if you're in front of one, if you're standing in front of a building, you obviously can't see what's on the back. But also, sometimes buildings preclude you seeing a building behind them. So if you're up in the air, and you've got a tallest building, and maybe there's a small one across the street, maybe you can't see that. So again, we had to kind of compensate for a lot of these things. When we originally did this, people thought we were insane. They're like, why do you want to do this, you know, like, trust us trust us. And it was very hard to even find a contractor to do it. And when we got the data, they were astonished. They're like, Wow, we had no idea we could get this kind of data.

Dusty Rhodes  19:08
Let me just say that there is a YouTube video of the data that you got. And when you watch the video, your jaw will drop and go, Oh, my God. And I have put a link directly to that video in the show notes in the description area of this podcast that we're listening to right now. So you can just click on it. And you can see it. Apologies, Deborah go on.

Debra Laefer  19:28
No, thank you. I think that's one of the best demonstrations of it. Because we're taking we didn't devise a sensor. We didn't even improve the sensor. But we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. So I think that the way the technology had been used this idea was like more data is better and you just get we can you smash it together and you kind of muddle through the best you can. And we took this more systematic approach of let's reverse engineer the process. fear what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data.

Dusty Rhodes  20:06
So now you have the data, what the problem is, is that you have an enormous amount of data. And that's the next problem. The next challenge, what do you do with it? I mean, how do you sort? Those many ones and zeros? Yeah.

Debra Laefer  20:22
So the basic storage of it, the I would call the static store, it's just, you know, putting it somewhere is not so much a problem. My brother used to work for Google, and he would joke, you know, what's a petabyte between friends? So it's not the storage, it's, as you said, it's the sorting. It's the what they call the queering. It's the retrieving of the data. And so we really, with my help, my long term colleague and collaborator Michela Berta loto, at UCD, really sat down and looked at a lot of the work that she had done in database and database structures, and talked about, well, what were our needs? How is the community currently doing at least some of this work? And what was that opportunity. And so in about 2006, we really started in earnest, taking on that problem. And I would say that that work really culminated about nine years later, when we graduated, jointly drew graduated a PhD student who demonstrated that you could very effectively use the data structure as the fundamental building block for post processing algorithms. So that you already have stored the data in a way that is highly usable. The paper that on jeuveau are joins graduate student who is still in Ireland is the lead author on is in the top point, zero 1% of all papers cited. For the years published, this technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research, so that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets. So which is really amazing.

Dusty Rhodes  22:24
So you put some banners on the data, then how do you integrate it with other technologies? So a lot of people talk about GIS and bi M and stuff like that? How do you get that data then interacting with them? So engineers can actually use it? 

Debra Laefer  22:37
Yeah, I'd say actually, most of the ways that us engineers use it reaction, computational models. So certainly, there are ways to tie it to GIS systems, the time we were working, there wasn't even a full 3d solution, which meant that it was what they call two and a half d solution, which means that every Z point, every elevation point, there could only be one unique one for every xy point. So if you had a building that was truly straight, there was no way at that x, y point, you know, at that corner of your street, or the corner of your building, to represent both the bottom and the top. So you had this kind of slightly wedding cake effect, where the points were actually slightly offset. Obviously, the technology has moved on from now, these GIS systems can both produce and host 3d models. But to just to give you a sense of kind of where we were, you know, with us BIM kind of really wasn't even really a thing by then. And the challenge is, is that unlike a photograph, when you have a photograph, and you look at it, every pixel, every little space is filled, right? There's no blank spots. With the LIDAR data. It's not that way. Maybe the beam went through a window, and it didn't come back or you know, maybe it went through a tree and you it came back in like six different pieces. So you get this data set that's very non homogeneous. These often refer to a sparse, it's an ordered. So there's not no, there's no natural order, when you get it back from the vendor. mean, it's been geo referenced. But there's, it doesn't like say, Oh, this point belongs to a building. And this other point belongs to a building.

Dusty Rhodes  24:30
It's a bit scattered.

Debra Laefer  24:31
It's a bit scattered. It's a bit chaotic. So So we continue to pioneer really groundbreaking work in how to fundamentally store that data. Because very early on, it became clear that the sheer size of the data, it was a major impediment to people using it. And it's still content used to be so some of my most recent work that we've not published yet, really looks at how do you take a billion points and process them actually Just on a regular PC, you know, can you do that? So, for us, the bigger question was, how do you get these points into a computational model? We don't care, we're labelling them necessarily, may eventually want to label them to a certain extent, because you want to know if your material model for each piece is correct. But the bigger thing is, how do you generate what they call a watertight model. And this is where the 3d printing starts to sneak in. So to do a computational model, you have to do create what they call a watertight mesh, which means that every point has to be connected to other points through a set of lines, but these lines must connect at nodes, they can't overlap, they can't be a little short of them, right. And when you use the traditional transfer transformation processes that were available for ticket in the late 2000s, you ended up having to do a huge amount of manual correction. And if you're looking at a terabyte of data, that's not gonna work, right. Yeah. So we really had to kind of think about how do you overcome those problems. And through this wonderful kind of collaboration between computer science and through civil engineering that we had going on at UCD, between myself and Hamish Carr and our students, Tommy Hanks, and Lynch ronghong, we had this kind of Eureka moment that the way the computational models were set up, many of them used would look like almost a little bricks, that they were these eight noted elements, and that these eight nodes had no elements, which didn't have to be squares, that could be rectangles looked an awful like, the elements that we were using to do the storage axis that this is acting like a key is that, yeah,

Debra Laefer  27:02
in this, so we divided the data in something called an octree. So we're you chop it up into basically eight quadrants. And if there's no data in the quadrant, you forget about that part. And then you keep kind of digging down either until you only have a certain amount of points in a box. Maybe that's the amount of points that can be stored in the computer's cache and dealt with comfortably. Or maybe you do it more generically. And say you're just going to do you know, five divisions of these things. We realise that the octree and the computation model in the finite element, they looked a lot like so then we came up with two really pioneering algorithms to do that transformation. So as we were thinking about watertight, so what is starting to happen, the patents for the original 3d printers are expiring, and we're starting to see this boom of three. So actually, this is about 2012 2013. Starting to see this boom of home 3d printers, or the you know, low low in 3d printers. There's 3d printers this 3d printed that people are even talking about maybe can you 3d print a house, you know, all these things that people are now really excited the same way? Everybody's talking about AI now. So if you cast yourself back to 2013, everybody started with 3d printing through their predict 3d printed clothing and hats, and, and, and, and everything. How do we start saying, Well, if we're creating this watertight model, couldn't we use that same watertight model approach for 3d printing, because that's what you need. The input files for 3d printing have to be these watertight models. So there was an opportunity to apply for a competitive commercialisation type grant through the EU. At that point, I had received the European Research Council Award, which was the single largest single PI award that you could obtain at that time. And they had a program they wanted to really try to commercialise work. So you could then say, Okay, this piece of work came from his project. And we'd now like to try to commercialise it. So went through that competitive program, and we got a good amount of money. And we said, Okay, we have this wonderful used 3d printer, commercial grade metal 3d printer that we were able to acquire. And it quickly became apparent that this is a very expensive thing to run. It requires a huge amount of knowledge that you have to keep in the group. And we said, how are we going to sustain this? So we said, well, there's no 3d printing centres in Ireland. What if we just opened one, and that's that so that was our next big adventure. And we started to acquire other funding and other equipment and we really, you know, kind of graduated a whole class of people who then went on many of them to really lead the introduction of what are called Advanced Manufacturing in Ireland, including a guy named Brian Marin, who came to us off the dole through a, you know, train to work program. And it was so successful, that Brian became the main initial technician for the first National Advanced Manufacturing Centre. So I think, a real success.

Dusty Rhodes  30:31
Let me put this into some kind of a context, then on the engineering and design side of things because of our use of BIM. And we're used to digital twins, and you're able to play around the buildings and change things and see how it looks. How can you do that? Like, can you use this technology that you are working on to do that on a city wide level? 

Debra Laefer  30:50
Yeah. So obviously, acquiring the data takes a while processing the data. So it's not something that you just go out and do every day. But we do see that communities, municipalities, even states are doing this now on a pretty regular basis, if not once a year, once every two years, in fact, the United States, we are having the completion of our first national scam, which is pretty exceptional. The difficulty of processing and storing that data is in part related to the quantity of the data. If you want really good sub centimetre data, it's gonna be a lot. So that always has to be part of it. But we have certainly taken that data when we've, you know, generated middle little 3d models of parts of Dublin.

Dusty Rhodes  31:41
And where would an engineer be able to use that if he is looking as as a city planner? What kind of things would he be able to do with it?

Debra Laefer  31:48
So I think one of our very early visions when particularly we got our first data set back in 2008, we said status, so good, but it's not quite good enough. That the I think the aspiration was to have a data set that was so good, you could pick out the curb height. Wow. And I think that is what we really achieved in 2015, that the data was so good that we could determine bather, basically whether the edge of the sidewalk was handicapped accessible. So I think that's a very easy, accessible use case. We've now most recently moved, we just completed a project called Urban Ark, with UCD. And with work off under her up at Queen's University, Belfast, looking at urban flooding. And one of the key components to that was the detection of subsurface spaces, basements, parking garages, things like that. And although Lidar is a line of sight technology, we can get a pretty good understanding of some things, that there are the spaces and some extent the size of them. Based on if you're you know, the angle, you're collecting the data, you might see kind of the stairwell that many of our Georgian town-houses have, or even be able to capture some of the data through the windows, or the entrances to parking garages. And by incorporating that into a larger flooding model, we can determine more effectively where the risks really are, where's the water going? Are we over predicting, or these people are particularly at risk. And we've generated flood models that show that the subsurface spaces really have an impact of where the water's going, and how fast it's building up. So if you're trying to evacuate parts of the city, or deploy emergency services, you want to know where to do that you don't want to send people to the wrong places.

Dusty Rhodes  33:45
So listen, you've done Dublin City, I believe you're going for something slightly bigger for your next project.

Debra Laefer  33:51
We don't so much bigger, but maybe more technically advanced. So we've recently completed a one square kilometre area in south-west Brooklyn. And what's really special about that dataset is not only do you have this great LIDAR data, pretty much the equivalent but we didn't delve in a little bit denser. But we've coupled it with something called hyperspectral data, and hyperspectral data, ours is in the bottom of the shortwave range downward. So if you have materials that are known, and you can get the what they call the spectral signal from them, we can match that spectral signal with things in the built environment. So a computational model has two important components. One is the geometry. And that project through our lab work and those of others has largely been solved. But the assigning of those materials and those material properties has not and hyperspectral gives us that opportunity to start doing that.

Dusty Rhodes  35:02
So some exciting stuff happening, a lot going on. I love talking to you, because you're talking about things you did 20 years ago, that are almost like cutting edge. Now you have a type of brain that just thinks 2030 4050 years in advance. So I have to ask you, what do you consider now the main challenges that engineers today need to start thinking about?

Debra Laefer  35:25
I would say one of the main challenges is coupling these major weather systems or storm systems with that kind of urban level weather system, we have huge investments of, you know, trying to predict where hurricanes are going, and how much rain and how much storm surge. But what's really happening from the street level, say, up to the first 100 or two feet, there are not a lot of models. And yet all of that's controlling all these urban heat problems that we're having. And we just don't have those couple of models. So it's that multi-scale physics, that we're kind of missing right now, where people like me very much on the crowd at the bottom, could work with somebody like one of my collaborators, Olivia police here in our Chaos Group, which is our weather group in our maths department. Between Olivia and myself, there's a big space. And there's not too many people in that space. So I think that that's really where we need to start going.

Dusty Rhodes  36:32
I also wanted to ask you, because I was watching an interview with you, you were talking about the advice you give to your students, which I mean, it just rang true with me. It's when you're a student, make mistakes, because you learn more from mistakes. And when things go right. Now, that's great to say to students, we're all engineers listening to this podcast. Can you apply that to engineering in a real life professional situation? Or should you just have made audio mistakes in college?

Debra Laefer  37:02
One of the highlights of my educational career was getting to meet a geotechnical engineer named Ralph back. And Ralph peck at the time was the most important living geotechnical engineer in the world. And he had been a student of Karl Terzaghi, who is the founder of geotechnical engineering. And he would come at the age of, you know, 79. And he would give these talks about when he was a young engineer, working under Karl Terzaghi, and all the mistakes that he made. So it's good to make mistakes. And it's good to have senior engineers check them.

Dusty Rhodes  37:42
Keep trying new things, regardless. Yeah, kind of wrap up then by just ask, is there anything else that you'd like to add to our chat today that I haven't thought of? Or haven't brought up?

Debra Laefer  37:53
Yeah, I mean, I think that if people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up. That if you push on it hard enough, long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem that a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on them.

Dusty Rhodes  38:15
If you'd like to find out more about Debra and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Professor Debra Laefer from NYU Centre for Urban Science and Progress, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating chat.

Debra Laefer  38:31
Lovely to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Dusty Rhodes  38:35
And if you enjoyed our podcast today do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For pre-released episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. But for now, until next time, from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.

One of the biggest challenges of the climate crisis is power. How do we harness it, store it, use it and most importantly, make it more sustainable.

Engineers have been creating fantastic solutions in power, but storing it is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome. Today we hear from an Irish engineer who is actively responding with some very clever solutions.

Our guest has worked with decarbonization at EU level and is leading his own social enterprise that creates energy storage solutions for homes, farms and small businesses. He is co-founder and Director of Range Therapy Eamon Stack. 

 

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• A new way of thinking about power supply and storage
• Second life batteries and how they can be utilised
• Using battery stored power in buildings, businesses, farms and home
• Creating a circular recycling programme for batteries in Europe
• Storing wind and solar power in batteries for cost effective power

 

GUEST DETAILS
Eamon Stack is an award-winning serial social entrepreneur. He co-founded Range Therapy in 2020, responding to the climate change crisis by focusing on reducing energy emissions, one of the big three human causes. Range Therapy offers second-life EV battery packs to upgrade older EVs and to offer substantial energy storage solutions at an affordable price for homes, farms and small businesses.

Eamon’s background is in software engineering, with 35 years development experience in the nonprofit sector. He was founder and former CEO at ENCLUDE for 18 years. This charity is focused on building the ICT capacity of the Irish Charity Sector.

 

MORE INFORMATION

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

 

QUOTES

After high powered use of a battery in a car for 15 or 20 years, they have another 20 years of life available to them as energy storage. - Eamon Stack

That's what's wonderful about the transition from an energy system where we just burn and waste fossil fuels to one that is perfectly circular and completely sustainable. This is really very good news for everybody in the system. - Eamon Stack

The Environmental Protection Agency might view a second life battery out of a car as a hazardous waste. That's a problem we need to deal with, this is a national asset. - Eamon Stack

It's a whole new world, and it's an exciting new world where there's a potential. The Holy Grail here is storage, we make tons of power, where can we store it at a price that makes sense. - Eamon Stack

 

KEYWORDS

#batteries #energy #cars #electric #engineers #grid #power #recycling #sustainability

 

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

 

Dusty Rhodes  00:01

Right now on AMPLIFIED, we find out how one engineer is fighting climate change by putting car batteries into buildings.

 

Eamon Stack  00:07

It's a whole new world and it's an exciting new world where there's a potential. You know, the Holy Grail here is storage. We make tons of power, where can we store it at a price that makes sense?

 

Dusty Rhodes  00:19

Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Three human causes are driving the change in our climate and as the people who design the future how engineers think about these causes is playing a vital role in the climate crisis solution. Today we're looking at one of those causes energy emission and speaking with an Irish engineer who is actively responding with some very, very clever solutions. He has worked at EU level creating a decarbonisation pathway with the ENCLUDE organization. And today, his Kildare based social enterprise helps extend the life of electric car batteries along with energy storage solutions for homes, farms and small businesses. It's a pleasure to welcome the co founder and director of Range Therapy, Eamon Stack, Eamon, how are you?

 

Eamon Stack  01:09

Great, delighted to be here Dusty and this is such an exciting moment, I think people would be interested in in this.

 

Dusty Rhodes  01:19

Listen, let's set the scene first, because we're all used to cars running on batteries at this stage. But with climate change and sustainability, front of mind in engineering design. Can you tell me more about Second Life batteries?

 

Eamon Stack  01:32

Yeah, I think this is something we might have missed that when we put you know, the Irish objective is to put a million electric cars on the road. Now the deadline was a little bit too soon, you know, half our cars, but to put to decarbonize transport, we need electric cars, there are brilliant engineering solution to the problem. People don't quite realize that yet. But what happens at the end of time, so every year at the minute, we're putting 20,000 electric cars on the road. And what happened to 20,000 batteries at the end of that life, the assumption was that they would go to recycling. But after a high powered use of a battery in a car for 15 or 20 years, they have another 20 years of life available to them as energy storage. And of course, that's the national problem. How do you store electricity, it's really expensive. We can't build more hydro electrics, we can't do the more pump Hydros. Like Turlock Hale, making hydrogen is a solution. It's it's very difficult and expensive and huge losses. But if we have batteries, and we own them already, why not use them to store our energy?

 

Dusty Rhodes  02:35

So what you're saying is we get 20 years life out of a battery that's in a car. But once that's done, there's another 20 years of life in that, how does it work? Well,

 

Eamon Stack  02:46

the car yeah, when you put down the accelerator in the car, you're demanding, you know, but 100 kilowatts of power from from a battery. And when you're charging at you might even be charging at 100 kilowatts, that's a heavy power node. And after 15 years, the lithium ion batteries tend to just get a bit tired of that high powered environment. But if you put them in a domestic setting, and better still, in a backup setting, there's very little power. So in a house, you put on the kettle under three kilowatts. And when you're charging overnight, you're charging at three or six kilowatts, it's a light load, you might use the analogy, it's a very happy retirement Pro, for a very valuable battery pack.

 

Dusty Rhodes  03:27

So you're also saying that because you're saying that they're talking about kettles, and houses and stuff like that, that they don't just necessarily are used with cars, but this second life can be adapted to buildings.

 

Eamon Stack  03:38

That's right, yes, for domestic energy storage for small enterprise storage. And then of course, for backup, I mean, traditionally, you would have a diesel or petrol generator as your electrical backup. And it's that that has to be kept maintained and running. Whereas if you had a solid state battery there as in its, if not no moving parts, it will sit there and hold the charge for years and will turn on instantly. That's the beauty of it, that you know, the power is available instantly. And then you move from that from you know, from centers. I remember credit unions talking about this, that they have legal obligations to have backup systems and then farms and hospitals so you know, these battery packs are invaluable. Or even I'm

 

Dusty Rhodes  04:21

thinking at festivals or if you're out for a walk in the park or whatever and you're you've you've got a van there the student fast food costs things like generators government, ruining your Paki day kind of kind of absolutely isn't that situation is just you have

 

Eamon Stack  04:33

your battery and we have that we call it the range trainer. You can pull it up, and it has lots of power and then you bring it home at night and charge it up for cheap. So it's much cheaper than the you know the litres of fuel that are used by a coffee shop. I think we were still about five times cheaper for the actual business. And then we have we were at the electric picnic and kind of thank God wouldn't it be great to change the diesel electric picnic to a real electric picnic where they're not using Isn't generators for power?

 

Dusty Rhodes  05:02

We'd show them kids a thing or two. Yes. But listen, I mean, it's great thinking about, you know, kind of vans or or houses or residential houses, can this solution actually be scaled up? How big can it go?

 

Eamon Stack  05:14

Well, if you think about the numbers of cars, so we've, we put 100,000 new cars on the road every year. So if we were putting 100,000 electric cars on the road every year, which we should be doing within 20 years, that means there's 100,000 batteries coming off the road every year. That's massive storage, like megawatts of storage, that that can be available. And we need to get that then into our energy ecosystem or National Energy ecosystem needs to program in how these these batteries are coming out of cars. And they're coming out two ways. It's surprising how many cars we crash that get written off, hopefully with nobody hearts. So we got a whole lot of batteries from from crashed cars, but then end of life cars and just say, Okay, here's a system now, where whereby we have 100,050 kilowatt hour storage units, which can give power at 100 megawatts, or 100 kilowatts each, like really powerful machines. And we have them available for our ecosystem, until we build, you know, a common wait for larger storages to put them in containers. And so you've got units of containers, and you build up a massive storage thing. So that the challenge the engineering challenge, is to plan this, this is going to happen anyway, let's learn how to do it and do it well, and do it safely and compliant. And then at the end of the cycle, so you have your new battery pack, then you have 20 years of that pack in the car, then you've got 20 years of storage, and then you have 98% recycling of all that material for a new battery pack. So you've got a perfect energy, circular economy. And we need to work this

 

Dusty Rhodes  06:57

out. And we're going with sustainability, the app completely sustainable model. Tell me a little bit about 98% recycling, how cuz? Well,

 

Eamon Stack  07:06

one of the great things about lithium batteries is the metals are in the batteries, and very light compounds are not complex. So you have two types of lithium batteries, you have the nickel based ones so that on the cathode side, you've got nickel, manganese, and cobalt. But there are three very valuable metals. And cobalt, lithium would be premium metals within the European Union that they want to preserve. But nickel is very valuable. So that's one sort of batteries. And then the other batteries are LFPS lithium iron phosphate batteries. And again, we wanted to get the lithium and the iron and reuse it. And then on the anode side of batteries, it's just carbon, it's just graphite. And again, most graphite is made in China now, because it's, it's not the cleanest of processes. So it seems logical, you keep all that stuff in Europe. And once we have it, we keep it and recycle it. And that's what's wonderful about the transition from an energy system where we just burn and waste fossil fuels to one that is perfectly circular, and completely sustainable. This is a really very good news for everybody in the system. And that's what we're on to promote. Now,

 

Dusty Rhodes  08:16

there is balance and everything there's good in this band is ying and yang. And everything you say about the batteries we're using today are good, what are the disadvantages of today's batteries?

 

Eamon Stack  08:26

I mean, the problem is they use a lot of resources to make them so we you know, Ireland needs to make enough batteries for 2 million cars isn't really no one. Yeah, I think it's 2 million cars we have on the road. So we need to make all those batteries. So there is an A cost a carbon cost of making the batteries, that's a negative. But that is completely offset by the fact that they can be completely recycled. So once we mined them once, we don't need to keep doing that. And once we get the manufacturing process, but the alternative is a filthy process of taking oil, heavy oil out of the ground, and then invest, you know, huge energy is required to crack oil and take and break it into its components. So the analysts say that the comparison and energy wise is about 400% better. So the electric electric car, for instance, will be 400% cheaper than the alternative and therefore it's not perfect, but at least it's subsidized four times better than the other. They sound

 

Dusty Rhodes  09:25

amazing. And I wanted to ask you about this because there are other types of batteries that are being developed those solid state batteries and then there's sodium ion batteries, what are you able to tell us about them and the advantages and disadvantages.

 

Eamon Stack  09:37

Solid State batteries the the attractiveness was to take the liquid electrolyte out of the battery, which is a volatile component. And in theory that's possible and they've made it for small devices. However they for scaling it they're having difficulties so so it's in process we might see in five or maybe 10 years time, if they can perfect it and get it onto the market. And then the advantage of solid state is they can charge very fast. That's the idea, maybe four times faster than the the equivalent lithium ion battery. So that's that's what they're going for. But I always say to people be very careful of products in development, because you don't know what's going to happen. And then when when, you know, when I was younger engineer, we were looking at, you know, is battery cars the way future? is hydrogen cars the way future or is there something else that's going to come 25 years on you realize hydrogen is a complete dud. It's a complete non engineering disaster. But But that's so it was it looked good 30 years ago, it's absolutely ridiculous solution today. So that's that in time you tell, what's the good news is there's this British engineer, John, good enough, is a key inventor of both the nickel based lithium batteries and the art based he did both of them. It's quite an extraordinary story and got a Nobel Prize with others, you know, to get credit for that. So there are dangers last year, but like these batteries are perfectly adequate. They have matured to a level now technology that are absolutely perfectly adequate for what we need. Every year. There's small improvements. Now it but essentially, the the energy density is at a point where it does everything we need.

 

Dusty Rhodes  11:20

I'm wondering how we can scale this up to engineering size? Because a lot of people you talk to you. I mean, they're dealing with wind generation and water generator power. I mean, that's a lot of power. I mean, is this solution of using old batteries entered to store that power? I mean, what are the problems of making that happen? And how can we get over them?

 

Eamon Stack  11:38

Yeah, it's like it's part of the solution in terms of gigawatts of power and gigawatts of storage. You're a long way from that. Okay, so that's where possibly hydrogen,

 

Dusty Rhodes  11:48

is it possible is the first thing? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

 

Eamon Stack  11:51

But it's a major contribution, because it's going to scale anyway, like, we're going to put 2 million electric cars on our roads. That's, that's in process. And we also have lots of batteries and other applications, and therefore they will be available. It's the key engineering challenge here is to take full advantage of them in a safe way, and make sure we get the maximum value out of these things. Like we could start from a point where the the environmental protection agency might view a second life battery out of car as a hazardous waste. Like that's a problem we need to deal with. Where we need to get to is this is a national asset. And that's where the engineers need to take it away from the EPA and says, Don't Don't, don't don't these really valuable entities for us. And yeah, that's the I think your point and scaling is important. There's a certain limit to it, it might get up to a gigawatt of storage. But we would need more than that the you know, we use 10 gigawatt hours a day or whatever in our lives. We use, we use a lot, but it's significant.

 

Dusty Rhodes  12:54

And one of the things that I learned in one of our other interviews was with wind stories, they said they can store stuff in batteries. But how long does it stay stored in the battery for? Well, I mean, can you belong to a battery in a long time? Yeah, no,

 

Eamon Stack  13:10

no, I figured it wouldn't be lost. There'd be 10% loss in the process of putting it in and taking it out. But in terms of storage, no, no, I think it is a battery pack. We've seen them sitting there for a year and very listen to her. So it's great. It's great storage.

 

Dusty Rhodes  13:25

And what have you heard that about grid scale? battery storage systems? Has anybody tried it?

 

Eamon Stack  13:30

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's two systems. One is like the leaders in that are Tesla saying an example. It's fairly in California. So they have these huge mega packs. So they have, you know, 400 megawatts of storage in a center? Right? So that's one What about the storage and it's really successful, because it instantly responds to grid demand. So this is the thing, stability in the grid is as important as the power. And this thing can instantly respond. And they've done the same in in South Australia, where there was this famous project where Tesla said, we'll do it in 100 days, or we give you your money back. And they did it they built a 250 megawatt storage in South Australia. And that solves that grid problem. And they couldn't believe the return on investment was massive. So it's this has been done in quite a few places. So that's one way to do it. Large storage units. I think it was recently one installed in the UK as well. The other thing then is in Tesla has these domestic storage units, they call them Tesla Powerwalls. So they will be 1020 kilowatt hours of storage, but then network them in us in California. And so they have this software called Ultra bitter and and the Automator is bidding for power to buy and sell power. And it has customers 1000s and 1000s of customers who have signed up to this VPP virtual power plant and so whenever the grid needs power instantly that can turn on these domestic units. So you have the large storage units. And then you've got the network small networks are of 1000s of units. And this is live, this is working. This is this is the future. So when we're installing battery storage in a domestic setting or a small business setting, our medium term objective is to network all them together. So that we will be able to trade with the ESB and say, we've got 1050 kilowatt hours of storage. More importantly, we've got power available to you instantly, so that if the grid needs stability, we can provide that both at a micro grid and local grid area and more nationally,

 

Dusty Rhodes  15:47

you kind of lead me on to another thing that I've heard about this is vehicle to grid V to G. And it's a kind of a smaller version of it, where it's the cars are drawing power, of course, when they're charging up, but then when you plug them in at night, the computer is able to figure out that well, you know, you're not going to use that much power tomorrow or based on your usage or whatever. So it's putting power back into the grid Have I got that right?

 

Eamon Stack  16:10

That's the same thing. That's the same thing, then as a as a virtual power plant where you are the cars are plugged in. And then you choose you say, Okay, I'm using my car tomorrow for this distance. And so I need this most power, so you can have some of the rest. And sometimes they only have a small bit of power, they just need it available. So currently in the UK, this has been piloted by octopus energy. So it's not far away, where they're actually piloting. And this will become standard, I think, where where cars will be plugged in with less on the US affecting is that a lot of school buses. So they're transitioning school buses to VPPs, whereby they're becoming you know, electric school bus is sitting there out there doing nothing. And there are power source for the grid. So it's a whole new worlds. And it's an exciting new worlds where there's a potential. And the you know, the Holy Grail here is storage, we make tons of power, where can we store it at a price, that makes sense. And so if you have 2 million cars on the road, well, that's a storage bank that is massive. And then if you have all these Second Life, batteries in houses, and whatever you build up. So that's where I think we need to design our future grid. With this in mind, this is now the door has opened for us. And we're in the sense leading the way but by actually doing this.

 

Dusty Rhodes  17:27

So that's amazing. So instead of energy, going into a car in the form of electricity, batteries, or even petrol, or whatever it happens to be, it becomes a transactional thing. So the car kind of goes well, I'm going to need this, I'm going to run out of whatever storage so I'm going to put this back into the system while I still have it done. It's mind blowing Amon, but

 

Eamon Stack  17:46

there's something more significant here. So you know, you listen to you know, there's a lot of negativity about electric cars from sources, which are probably the the oil companies themselves, they don't like this change, it's going to cost them a lot of money. However, think about it. They say I'm from carry right carry has 1000s of wind turbines generating power. So at night, there is a tons of energy available at night. So all carry transport could be powered by carry energy. At almost no cost to the system, it's already there. The impetus generating capacity is there, the infrastructure is there. Imagine that transitioning from importing fuel, mostly from Saudi Arabia to power or transport to using our own energy is that a shocking thing in terms of macroeconomics, stop importing stuff that is dirty and polluting, and a problem for us, let's use our own energy to power our own lives. And I tell you, this hasn't happened since 100 years ago, this summer, when I don't know if you know, this guy, Thomas McLaughlin arrived home and in summer holidays from Siemens in Germany, 100 years. And he approached the Irish government and said, My company is interested in building the world's biggest hydroelectric plant in your, in Ireland on the Shannon. And what we're also going to build the first national electric grid. And they did that between 1924 and opened in 1929. mega project, we were energy independent with sustainable energy in 1929. And it was, I just love the visionary stuff of that to say, let's see, let's see what is possible for Ireland. And in that case, they took Ireland which was a small, you know, many, many little micro grids that were very dodgy to transform Ireland and to have 100% power generated from art and a crusher and and to build the first national grid, which of course, we should be very proud of, because it's still an outstanding grid. And that grid today has capacity as wind capacity that we don't use as much as a terror. terawatt hour, enough energy we don't use Every year to power Galway for two years, that's how much energy we don't use. Let's learn harvest that. So we're in terms of the individual households where this has an effect is there is energy at night, as cheap as five cents a unit. And daytime energy is 35 cents a unit. So if I can fill up a battery with five cent electricity at night, my ASP bell goes down fivefold. And this is not imaginary. This is actually the economic reality of today. And as we expand our wind turbine infrastructure, surely in the middle of the night, the price electricity can only go one direction, and lectures to be really cheap. So as a nationalist strategy, this is is absolutely fantastic. And that's the story I want to say to people, we, we really need to stop purchasing, polluting energy sources from Saudi Arabia, they have enough money, they don't need our money when we need to. And it makes next macro economic financial sense and of course domestic financial sense. And it is the pathway to dealing with our co2 emissions, which I'm told we're going to be fined a billion a year from 2030. If we don't resolve this issue. Well,

 

Dusty Rhodes  21:26

listen. So you've been talking about what we did 100 years ago, here we are today, there is a brilliant solution, the one you're talking about is one of a number of brilliant solutions. And they're all there. Is Ireland actually implementing any of these new technologies. I mean, it should engineers be be thinking about this and starting to get these things into their designs. No,

 

Eamon Stack  21:45

absolutely. I think lots of engineers are involved in this. The ESB is a bit of a dinosaur, it's difficult to move, they might have done some of this planning 20 years ago, but at least they're doing it now. You know, we're introducing renewables, the national strategy, and I heard a presentation and the engineer Ireland conference last year, you know, on the, you know, the ESP is national strategy. So it is offshore wind would be the primary source of energy, and they're building the motorway to find it may be a civil engineering project. But ultimately, it's going to a port that is going to allow us install a massive capacity of energy in the Atlantic, wherever there's tons of energy. So we're doing this, our best is in terms of when you're generating that energy, one place we can store it is this new resource that we might have missed? We might have seen and that is the you know, like you said, the vehicle to Grid Electric Car storage. But also then the second life of those batteries in other stories, domestic and business energy storage.

 

Dusty Rhodes  22:48

Yeah. And even though we're talking about cars, this can equally be applied to buildings, you just look as a building as a big car that doesn't go anywhere. That's right. So absolutely. If you think that way, well, the same principles apply, don't they? Yes. So

 

Eamon Stack  23:01

kind of give you an example here where we've been talking to farmers to dairy farmers, there's 18,000 of them milking at peak time for energy at in the evening. So if you if they can purchase that energy, really cheap in the middle of the night, and use that to power their portrait milking parlor that would save themselves between 10 and 20,000 euros a year. And the batteries are there, we figure for an average dairy farmer about 8080 cows, they would need 80 kilowatt hours of storage. That's it a pollster, battery pack, and we have lots of them. So we were already working with designing a system to go into dairy farms. The scale is 18,000 Farms.

 

Dusty Rhodes  23:48

When I'm looking at your website, range therapy, I mean, you've got some great pictures that really give an example of what it is that you do. And basically kind of you you convert a trailer that somebody can carry around behind their food van or the car or whatever it happens to be or, or whatever. How can you scale that? Have you scaled that up then so that it's more than just a trailer? Have you actually installed this system into into buildings?

 

Eamon Stack  24:11

So we know if we the trailer is the mobile version, and then the static versus the range was the house one so we've done 10 houses, we've done houses. And so it's interesting then for people listening to say is compliance is a huge issue here and what has slowed us down. So what we have done over the last few years is we have upgraded at nearly 100 cars with batteries that came out of crashed cars that were bigger than the old batteries in the car. So we swapped out the old small battery for a bigger battery from a crashed car surprised me how many crash car so now we've accumulated all those batteries, but we weren't willing to install them in a domestic setting until all the engineering compliance stuff was resolved. So one of the issues was that if you have a battery pack When something goes wrong, you want the control system to have the ability to turn it off, to intervene before it moves down. Because all engineers would know the ultimate danger of a lithium ion pack is thermal runaway. So if the, if it gets hot, it gets extremely hot and will cause a serious fire. However, once you have the battery management system that monitors that battery pack, it just turns it off before that ever happens. And so for instance, the oldest production electric car is in this leaf. And there has never ever been a thermal issue with a Nissan LEAF in nearly a million units in 1000s of crashes. And that's because the battery management system turned it off before it went down that route. So in terms of putting them into houses, we had to make sure we could do exactly the same thing that we would get the data from the battery management system and our control unit, and then have the capacity to turn the battery off. If there's any deviation from from the key thermo are voltage values. Can you

 

Dusty Rhodes  26:01

give me a sample of one of the houses that you've installed the system into and just kind of give me an idea of of how it worked and the problems you had to get over and the and then the solutions you came up with and how it's benefited that the house?

 

Eamon Stack  26:14

Yes, our first installation was in in Cary. And it was a new built house that had a air source heat pump. So it was completely electrical house in it. And it's very passive. So the thing we needed was to make sure that the saw a solar system was installed by a local company and Gilroy energy and carry, and that the inverter they used to invert the AC DC, the DC to AC energy for the solar had to have the capacity for the voltage of the battery pack. So cars generally use 400 volt systems. And therefore the inverter had to be able to handle the battery. So we were able to intervene and say we need this particular inverter, which is an Austrian Fronius inverter that can handle 400 volts in that case. And that was the only intervention, then we went to the house and we had to find the location for the battery pack. So it's kind of 1.6 meters by one meters, 350 kilos, 350 kilos,

 

Dusty Rhodes  27:15

you're not taking that on a plane.

 

Eamon Stack  27:18

So so so that looked like they were building a shed with the house. And so we located the battery in the shed. And then with the challenge was to wire the cables from the battery pack into the inverter. So it turned out to be a 40 meter journey, we thought it'd be much shorter. So that was one of the more challenging ones, 40 meters of cables. So you've got the power cables, and then you've got the data and control cables going. And then beside the inverter, we put our control box. So the owner of that house after we went back after a couple of months, and he said to us, he's an accountant, and he said, This is extraordinary. He said, I don't pay for any electricity. I don't pay for any oil or gas because I heat my house with electricity. And I sell electricity back to the grid and get a free pint every day. He said that's a good deal by any accountancy terms.

 

Dusty Rhodes  28:12

Do you know it's a pity this is an audio podcast because I really want to stand up and applaud you aim. And that's that's just brilliant. And as you say, the challenge now is to kind of take that now from that size. And to adapt it to I'm gonna say skyscrapers just for the for the sake, how can engineers that listening now and kind of gone? This is a really good idea? How can they better educate clients, or even around bosses about the benefits and proper maintenance of battery systems?

 

Eamon Stack  28:41

Yeah, I think we need one of the factors that limited the deployment of battery electric technology with the cost. And now we've found that we actually already have Irish batteries, we don't manufacture them, but we have lots of them that are very low cost, so that we can overcome that problem. So what you need then is the compliance stuff. So you just need so I have a friend was asking me about it in his house. And then he stopped and said, I have a dental practice that we use a very significant amount of energy during the day. He said, Could you put a battery into my dental practice? And he said, I don't own the building, we rent the building. So I might want to put solar panels up or whatever. But it says can you put a battery in the backyard so that it charges up during the night or whatever? And I said No problem. No, you know, it might be six to eight grand to power the operation, maybe 50 to 80 kilowatt hours of storage. But I said that is actually no problem. In fact, having a Kia Soul battery battery we already have that will be perfect for your child. So that's it it's just a matter of being able to use it now one thing interesting, dusty as well, from an engineering point of view, you might be tempted to break up a battery pack to make it in the format you want or the voltages you want. But actually if you can use The batteries already certified for automotive grades use in there, you have a very high quality certified unit. And so there's a huge advantage of just keeping the battery pack, taking it straight out of the car in its case, and using the battery pack as is. So that's part of a very good strategy. And that's what they do with containers that take the physical battery packs out of the cars and put them on shelves, and then connect them together, that that's the best way to do it. Best strategy. One

 

Dusty Rhodes  30:28

last question for you, because you said the C word not me. Compliance? Where do we stand with getting the authorities to rubber stamp and approve these things?

 

Eamon Stack  30:36

Yeah, so so this is well, well down the road here, the EU has looked at this. And in terms of cars, they have done something that was a little surprising, but sensible. When you're now scrapping an electric car, the car has to be split between the traditional carpet and the battery pack. So the battery pack has to go down a different recycling routes. And then at that point, the EU has recognized the second use of batteries is if it's is growing industry, a really important industry. So they've allowed that space. And they have defined then the some of the requirements that are needed. So a automotive battery has a battery management system. And it's got a metric called the state of health. So what they're saying is that the battery has to be better than 50% state of health to be usable in a domestic setting. And then after that it's essentially end of life and ready for recycling. So what what we what we have introduced that in our system is this monitoring system of the state of health of our batteries. And so that's locally available. And it's also now we're building an external server to monitor all our batteries. So that once they approach the end of life, then we will take them out, send them to recycling and then replace them with similar units. So that's what's important that in terms of compliance that we are not alone, are we aware of this, but we actually have systems in place that can deal with batteries that fall below 50% state of health.

 

Dusty Rhodes  32:07

Somebody is listening today and they want to find out more and dig a little bit deeper from an engineering perspective, where would you suggest they go? Are there any particular websites or books or Yeah, Netflix or right?

 

Eamon Stack  32:17

Yeah, no, read sarpy.org our sites is probably a good place to go. Again, it's relatively new. So people are just going to have to try engineer Ireland's podcasts that might be an interesting podcast. They're like to see more articles in the journal and so on. So that's it's a new world. And we're beginning to see,

 

Dusty Rhodes  32:45

I do have to say that and I would recommend it because you're not like a limited company and for profit kind of a thing. You're a social enterprise social enterprise, you have social enterprise, okay. So it's more important, what you're doing as the profit side of it, so to speak. And I found that with the website, which is range therapy.org, where you go, that there's a lot of actual genuine information that you can find out about what Amon is doing. And it's not like it's not a hard sell kind of a website, like sign up here. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like, you know, there's a lot of really good information on that. So I definitely recommend the link to Ames website is in the description area of this podcast. So just click on that. And away you go with it. There's an amen. Is there anything else that we'd like to add in? Or any final thoughts you want to share with us today? Yeah,

 

Eamon Stack  33:31

I think in order to develop winning engineering resources into that we need academic paper to look at it. And we, you know, we need work on the compliance side because those EU regulations haven't yet been implemented and how they're going to be implemented. And we want to make sure that engineers inform how those regulations are implemented, that we don't do something silly and stop ourselves from going down this excellent roofs. So there is also a temptation that there have been recycling plants built that are hungry for batteries. So let's not give into the temptation of giving them our batteries when they have another 20 years of life available to us. So there there's a tension there that we have to live in economic tension where we don't want to be, you know, where you have hungry, new battery recycling systems built, but the supply isn't big enough yet to merit the investment. So the temptation is to give them all the batteries. Don't give away our Irish Batteries, Please, let's use the

 

Dusty Rhodes  34:27

Listen, yeah, we did it 100 years ago, with hydro electricity we can do it again. If you'd like to find out more about Eamon and some of the topics that we talked about today, we have notes and link details in the description area of the podcast as I said, but for now Eamon Stack, engineer, co founder and director at Range Therapy, thank you so much for being an amazing guest today. Thank you,

 

Eamon Stack  34:49

Delighted Dusty thank you indeed.

 

Dusty Rhodes  34:52

If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player or on YouTube. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for previous episodes, more information on engineering across the country or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time from myself Dusty Rhodes as always, thank you for listening. Take care