Philippe Alleil (Forsee Power Solution) about batteries, mobility and medical equipment

Philippe Alleil is the industrial director of Forsee Power Solution, a France-based international battery integrator. He explains why some of the most innovative technology today depends on energy storage capacity. From his engineer perspective, batteries appear to be far more complex than they seem. 

The battery is a two-century-old technology. What are its innovation perspectives today?

Philippe Alleil: Two hundred centuries ago batteries were heavy, bulky and quite simple technology-wise. They were not powering many devices. Today’s battery are high tech items. They are a combination of electrochemistry and electronics. They are small, light, and powerful. They are embedded in any type of devices, from the smallest, like mobile phones, to the biggest, like trucks or buses. The technology has improved for the last two century and its keeps improving today. In the future, batteries might replace power plants for instance, by storing huge quantity of energy and work like actual power providers. The potential for innovation is still huge but it takes a lot of time to develop.

An efficient technology is usually standardized. How do professional users manage to benefit an ever-changing piece of technology like a battery?

Philippe Alleil: As far as we are concerned, the speed of technical improvement is not a problem for us. Neither for our customers. Forsee Power Solutions is not a cell manufacturer. We are a system integrator, meaning that we monitor all the technologies available on the market, we know all the cells’ spec sheets and take care of selecting the right one for our clients. To put it simply, they trust us to pick the right electrochemistry for  them. Then we use our engineering skills to fit the cell in their product. We take care of matching and adapting the right technology with the right customers. Every time someone has a need for a mobile power supply and does not find the solution on his own, he calls an integrator. And that’s how the devices we all use every day are usually fitted with the best cell technology available on the market.

What are the responsibilities of a battery integrator like Forsee regarding the performance of an energy storage solution?

Philippe Alleil: The integrator’s responsibility is tremendous. His job is to fit a battery system within a bigger system like a car, a bicycle, or a wheelchair for instance. Even though the integrator does not produce the cell he uses, he picks it on the behalf of his customer and plug it into his product. He can therefore be regarded as an intermediary. But from the customer’s perspective, the integrators is responsible for the reliability of the whole battery system. If the power solution ever fails in any way, the customers will come to the integrator. The job therefore requires a very good knowledge of the technology along with an excellent quality of service.

Forsee’s customers come from various sectors like medical equipment, mobility systems, and robotics. How do you manage to meet their specific requirements equally?

Philippe Alleil: It always starts with a good discussion between our development teams and our customers. Our first goal is to understand the environment of our customer’s product, and write down an index comprising all the product specifications. All the companies we know serve share a need for complex power solutions and want the technical part to be taken care of for them by a specialist. These companies look for advice as much as for the right battery system. We offer both and make sure they are 100 percent satisfied. It is very demanding, but very rewarding too. We no longer sell standard, mass-produced battery systems for instance. But people now come at us because they know our expertise in the field of high performance, high duration and safety battery systems.

Why is the medical industry such a big consumer for battery integration solutions?

Philippe Alleil: Actually, the medical industry does not consume more batteries than other sectors. However, it does have a need for very reliable, high quality batteries and power solutions. Medical devices manufacturers want guarantees regarding embedded battery systems. Integrators bring such guarantees. Hence, of course, Forsee Power Solutions frequently works with the medical equipment industry, and makes its expertise available for it.

Electric cars and mobility in general are still small however. Is mobility an important market for Forsee yet?

Philippe Alleil: Mobility is a key market for the future. We regard it as a development perspective since it is a technically challenging market. But it also carries a little bit of disappointment since it was expected to take off very quickly and to stand for up to 20 percent of the world automotive market. It is not yet the case. A couple a niche markets are taking off though. Electric trucks, electric buses, light wheels vehicles for instance are slowly becoming common in urban areas. They are used for delivery in city centers, for public transportation. They make life in cities more sustainable. Forsee works a lot with mid-sized companies which do not have their own development team for battery solutions. We can see that such companies grow in number and that they will keep doing so.

Robotics’ development depends mostly on energy storage solutions’ improvement capacity. What is the state of the art regarding in that field?

Philippe Alleil: Robotic industry today has not entered the mass-production stage. It is a niche market as well, producing prototypes and very innovative products. It is a technological showcase for many companies, including battery integrators like Forsee Power Solutions. When we work on this market, we select the most advanced cell technology, the most complex battery management systems in order to come up with the best of engineering. Everybody learns a lot from such projects. Robotics engineers learn, and we learn with them too since we have to figure out new solutions to solve problems that never occurred before. We have to be innovative to come around the limits of existing technology.

Maintaining reliability at the highest level as possible must require important R&D expense. What is Forsee’s policy regarding this matter?

Philippe Alleil: Of course R&D is important in order to ensure the high level of satisfaction reliability-wise. Besides we rely a lot on our engineers who take special care of reliability requirements. But reliability is a concern at every stage of the production no matter the client. We need to pay attention to it during the early stages of conception, during the manufacturing process, and afterwards with quality control process. Our quality policy applies to the every stages of value chain.

Most of your competitors are bigger than you. Why do your clients prefer a small service provider like you over larger ones?

Philippe Alleil: Many actors on the market were born twenty years ago, sometimes thirty years ago. Back then, producing a battery pack was a different industry. The job was requiring different skills. It was all about putting component together and delivering a pack. You hardly needed any top-notch engineering skill to do that. Nowadays, technology is very diverse, it has become more technical and intricate. You need those engineering skills to produce some very specific battery pack for very specific applications.

Forsee Power Solutions was once involved in producing very simple battery solutions. But we figured out there was a serious competition on the market already. This is why we choose to develop an offer based-on custom-made solutions and high added-value systems. In many cases, customers who look for such solutions come from very promising markets. We talked about robotics, and electric cars. Standard solutions for their needs do not exist yet. But these markets are up-and-coming, they keep growing and so do Forsee. All in all, being smaller than the biggest players is not really a problem for us.

A state of the clean-energy art : how is R&D doing ?

The energy market is the fastest-moving and fastest-growing ones in the world.  And concurring predictions indicate that, with the water market, it is where the 21^st century's history will take place. 

The water market is rather easy to analyze, calculate and predict, as the variables involved are few and known (human water consumption, cattle water consumption and farming/industrial water consumption). But energy consumption is harder to assess, as it relies not only on the increase in world population, but in the economic developments which will open access to basic energy-munching equipment for people. But, without knowing the specifics of what the future holds, the world is strained already in its energy consumption, and is trying to find new and cleaner ways to produce it.

Siemens and tidal power

Siemens has made quite an entry in the maritime energy world, by purchasing shares in Marine Current Turbines Ltd. In the race for clean and renewable energies, Siemens is putting its money on tidal power.  Grounds for such a move are several. Tidal energy is just as clean and renewable as wind energy, but it holds a considerable advantage over it : it is perfectly predictable. Tides answer to the moon, which follows a regular cycle, unlike wind, which is hectic in its evolution.  The storage of power being tricky, tidal power has an edge.  And the weight of water is the second competitive advantage : 1 knot of water stream provides 800 times more energy than the equivalent stream of wind.  Currently, marine turbines around the world supply only 3 or 4 % of its power needs. But the energy production mode is picking up, as with the demonstration (though commercially profitable) SeaGen project in Northern Ireland. The 1 500 houses of the Strangford Lough area have been supplied in power with only two turbines, which can put up 1,2 MW/h.  Siemens has considerably invested in ecotech, and can now brag on its website that, with the 30-billion worth of sales last year, it has avoided the equivalent CO² pollution of Berlin, Delhi, Hong-Kong, Istanbul, New York, London, Singapore, and Tokyo.  Combined.

CNIM : from waste recovery to solar and biomass energy

The sun also provides clean and renewable energy, but in ways which, for a long time, were very low on profitability. CNIM, a French engineering firm defining itself as technologically bold, is changing that. For years the company is one of the world leaders in waste recovery into clean energy, converting every metric ton of household waste into the equivalent of 200 liters of oil!

With its engineering experience CNIM has brought recently the solar technology to a new level, by investing in Fresnel mirror.  Instead of simply receiving an amount of energy equivalent to its surface, mirrors concentrate the sunlight and reflect it back onto the panel, which then converts the rays into steam or electrical power. In 2010, CNIM inaugurated an 800-square meter pilot plant in the South of France, to demonstrate the capacities it achieved in solar power production.

The company is also engaged in the upgrading of biomass power production. These plants produce clean energy for cities and burn their organic refuse, but they can also emit an unpleasant smell to the urban areas they are necessarily close to. CNIM, through its LAB S.A. branch, has invested in smoke treatment technology based on its experience in waste burning.  It is now able to « cleanse » the smoke before releasing it, thus making biomass the cleanest, most reliable and least troublesome power-production method for urban areas.

Alstom and wind energy

Alstom has taken the lead on harnessing wind energy. This market is the one that is the most poorly exploited so far, at about 2.5% of its 50 000 TW/h potential (about 1/3 of the current world consumption).  Despite occasional local opposition to wind turbines, the arguments in favor of this renewable energy tapping are numerous. And in a gamble that the production mode would rise dramatically in coming years and decades,  Alstom has developed the most advanced wind-power solutions. The three main Achille's heels of wind turbines are robustness, maintenance and efficiency.  With a hefty initial investment, the last thing a client wants is for the device to collapse or break down (on land or, even worse, at sea). Alstom has designed its towers in such a way as to separate energies, between wanted and unwanted. The wanted energy is funneled to the turbine and rotor, whereas the unwanted stresses are directed to the slim tower, thereby reducing general pressure on the general frame. Second, the youth of wind-power-technology gives little feedback to engineers, who need to calculate as accurately as possible the angles so as to avoid energy loss. Alstom has re-engineered its rotor blades to harness 40% more than the average offshore turbine. And finally, the engineering firm has kept from falling into the over-complexity trap, aware that more moving parts equal more maintenance and more breakdown chances ; so it's kept its machine simple, which clients will surely appreciate.

What comes out of the general overview of renewable energy innovation is that governments and political groups are merely those who make the most noise about renewable energies.  But the ones who actually drive innovation in the field of clean energy are private companies, not governments or political groups. The distance run in the past decade by engineering companies suggests there will be many outstanding shifts in the way the world produces its energy in the years to come.