“It’s kind of this one magic box that eliminates a lot of the infrastructure and also provides one control location that eliminates a lot of the interoperability challenges that you may see in a traditional data center, where various components within the data center are trying to regulate the same thing,” said Srdjan Lukic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “Now you have one conversion stage outside the data hall and then you just go straight to the rack.”

From “killer application” to mass adoption

Data centers have become the “killer application for solid-state transformers right now,” Lukic told Ars. Several US companies, including Amperesand, Heron Power and DG Matrix, have collectively raised more than $280 million in funding over the past year to commercialize solid-state transformer technology.

Solid-state transformers could also greatly reduce the amount of copper and other materials needed by data center projects, while their smaller physical footprints allow data center developers to do other things with the available space, Lukic explained.

In the long run, successful commercialization of solid-state transformers could even help ease the broader supply chain shortage affecting power transformers. That would make transformers more readily available for power grid upgrades and expansions beyond data center projects.

“There are relatively few specialized companies that manufacture [conventional] transformers, while solid-state transformers are like an electronics device,” Lukic said. “It completely opens up the space for who can play in the transformer space, and also opens up where transformers can be manufactured.”

The same benefits of solid-state transformers also apply to electric vehicle charging’s similar reliance on DC power. Lukic and his colleagues recently demonstrated how a solid-state transformer connected to a live grid power line could handle up to 1 megawatt of power when supporting the charging of an electric vehicle battery—the solid-state transformer performed the necessary step-down in voltage while also doing the AC to DC power conversion.