“We designed the world’s best something”: winding up and finding the positives

There are many reasons why promising startups pack it in. For one venture, formed to commercialise a breakthrough in wind turbine design, it came down to the scarcity and eventual disappearance of certain components. 

After forming in 2018 and eventually designing a suitably efficient controller to go with their super-efficient turbine and shroud design, Diffuse Energy had their invention out in the field. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency backed one trial for ten telco tower sites, and Diffuse saw potential in replacing diesel generation for operators of such sites.

But then came 2020 and the supply crunch for semiconductor components. For the turbine team, supplies ran down, then out, then came back. Sort of.

“We got to a point where we could probably get 90 per cent of what we needed at three times the price of what it was when we designed it, and then couldn’t get the last 5 per cent, which rendered the other… 95 per cent useless anyway,” James Bradley, CTO of the company, tells us about parts for the company’s controllers. 

“Because you need all of it for the thing to function. That 5 per cent of components are still off-market. So two-and-a-half years later they’re still not reaching the open market.”

After hoping circumstances might return to normal and weighing up the decision for 18 months, Diffuse made started wrapping up early this year, says Bradley.

In a small irony, he checked a supplier website for a critical part – a MOSFET gate driver made by Texas Instruments – after this interview, only to see that they’re now apparently back on the market.

As well as working out at a buck a piece unit price, the little integrated circuit formed an important role in their controller. 

According to Bradley, a redesign was risky and would’ve left them with a much more expensive controller, meaning a much less viable product, even if successful. And without any clarity on when normal supply of the “unicorn” part might resume, they couldn’t plan properly. 

After seeing out some delayed projects, including finally completing the ARENA one, the decision to quit was made.

Bradley says he learned a huge amount trying to commercialise something new and based on PhD research, and remains friends with inventor and co-founder Dr Joss Kesby.  

“There’s a pretty big gap between your favourite lab experiment and then sticking a thing out in the world on a site doing work,” Bradley adds.

When asked, he agrees that sometimes there’s an unrealistic expectation in Australia that every venture has to be a winner, and that anything less is a waste of time and money.

Despite the disappointments and the risks attached, he doesn’t hesitate to say he’d join another startup.

“I actually look now and go ‘could i go work for some big company again?’ I’d really struggle inside of that. At the end of the day, we designed the world’s best something. And you don’t get to do that, probably, very often in your life,” he shares. 

“The chances of doing that inside a big company are even less [laughs]. You get used to the craziness of a startup… I worked in a career in retail where every day was pretty damn similar. Father’s day is the same day every year. Christmas is the same day every year [laughs]. It’s rather the same-same. And the thought of going back to a regimented sort of job actually now scares the hell out of me.”

In this episode of @AuManufacturing Conversations, Bradley explains 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 more.

This episode is proudly brought to you by ECI Solutions.

Episode guide

1:24 – Career shift. Big box retail to going back to university to study engineering 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 – not a new idea, but a new solution to making it much more efficient by “unravelling the horrendous mathematics” involved in design and simulation.

7:40 – Early applications involving luxury yachts. 

8:35 – Changing focus to telecommunications tower applications, aiming to displace diesel generators.

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 driver product, TI’s UCC27282DRCR,  used in their controllers was a “unicorn”. It was 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?

Picture: the three co-founders, with Bradley on the left (credit University of Newcastle)

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