Episode 102 -- James Bradley from Diffuse Energy

In this episode of @AuManufacturing Conversations we hear from James Bradley, former CTO of Diffuse Energy, a micro-wind turbine business that its founders decided to end this year. He tells us about the company’s big idea, the progress it made before supply chain issues made it difficult to continue, the reality that university spinout businesses don’t always succeed, and why he’s still passionate about working with startups.

This episode is proudly brought to you by ECI Solutions.

Episode guide

1:24 – Career shift. Big box retail then mature age engineering student at age 32. 

3:13 – Meeting Joss and being involved with his work in the second half of Joss’s PhD.

3:52 – A concept for a very small turbine and forming a team to explore commercialisation of this via CSIRO ON.

5:40 – A diffuser-augmented turbine and “unravelling the horrendous mathematics” involved in design and simulation.

7:40 – Early applications involving luxury yachts. 

8:35 – Changing focus to telecommunications tower applications.

9:30 – An ARENA-backed, multi-site project focussed on telco towers, why they thought it was needed, and some of the difficulties involved.

11:20 – Having to design a controller that would handle difficult weather events. Then COVID happened in 2020 and made the project move very slowly.

13:03 – The trial and the results gathered. Developing a tool for more accurately predicting wind speed on sites. 

15:10 – “Yes, wind turbines can work on remote sites. Probably not as many as you’d hope for. They’ve got to be a pretty good site to make sense. But also we came up with a way of validating sites… pretty accurately”.

15:55 – The great global semiconductor shortage of the early 2020s and why there was no possibility of building what’s needed here.

17:05 – The type of MOSFET products used in their controllers were “unicorns”, which made them hard to replace when the supply chain broke.

23:04 – The lessons in this that are worth sharing, including in electronics design.

24:10 – We are probably not great at accepting the fact that commercialising scientific breakthroughs isn’t always going to be a success.

25:24 – Fundamental research is important, and its contribution to progress won’t be immediately apparent.

26:50 – The two co-founders’ friendship has survived the end of the business. “We’ll have a wake for Diffuse Energy soon.”

27:55 – Yes, he would do another startup. There isn’t the variety or the same chance of building “the world’s best something” in a big, established company.

28:50 – Current work with University of Newcastle on accelerator and pre-accelerator programs, which are available to regional businesses as well as spinouts.

30:17 – Is there a chance the invention might be used at a different business?

Further reading

Saving through smarter energy use – a future for our coal regions

Spin to win: turbine tech company proving itself to telco customers

Clean tech: the great green opportunity?

ARENA announces $342,000 support for small wind turbine installations