Before being accepted to the Indian Institute of Science, Rajib Datta contemplated a career as a fine artist. “I was good at math and physics, so I knew engineering or science was probably in my future,” he says. But he felt equally adept in the field that he’d pursued since childhood. A natural draftsman and painter, Datta still executes figurative works and sketches today, and now senses a resonance between visual art and his pioneering work with GE Vernova in the field of power electronics.
“Both require tremendous patience,” Datta says of painting and the science of converting power from one form to another. “Both involve great precision and detail.” And while engineering is collaborative, he says, “you still have to spend a lot of time thinking deeply and playing with stuff in order to produce something really good.” Datta, the chief engineer of power electronics at GE Vernova Advanced Research, is named as an inventor on approximately 50 patents, has co-authored numerous publications, and has received plaudits including a recent Lifetime Achievement in Research award from GE Vernova Advanced Research. But the full impact of his work is harder to quantify. In developing advanced motor, drive, and control technologies, he has helped transform the world’s energy infrastructure, leading the way to a more sustainable future.
Power Player
Datta came to the industry at an auspicious moment. He joined the company in 2002, just after GE acquired what is now GE Vernova’s Wind business. Working with GE Vernova’s Salem, Virginia-based manufacturing site, Datta helped design the new business’s power electronics for the first 1.5-megawatt wind turbine, co-created basic reference designs and system architecture for wind systems, and, within three years, saw the $200 million business grow to a $3 billion one that now has about 57,000 wind turbines in the field.
In 2004 Datta came up with an innovative conversion technology, the patented Multi-Pulse Converter. It was initially used in the oil and gas industry, whose motors for pipeline compression required an electric drive capable of processing an unusual combination of extremely high power at extremely high frequency. At GE Vernova Advanced Research in Niskayuna, New York, Datta synchronized multiple power converters and transformers to cancel the harmonics of the voltage waveform, producing a cleaner single-frequency output — which proved equally effective in amplifying the quality and consistency of power generated or processed by any high-power converter.
As the renewables industry evolved and the wind farms started producing a greater and greater percentage of the grid’s energy, producers of wind power became responsible for grid stability, with utilities demanding they deliver consistent energy at steady voltage and frequency that can be used by conventional power plants. “Here, we needed a different, very smart type of control for interfacing with the grid,” Datta explains, referring to what the industry now calls “grid-forming controls.”
Recently Datta has been more focused on the search for an efficient transport system for renewable energy, an electric pipeline that could bring electricity from the remote wind farms that produce it to the populated regions where it’s used. Since high-power electricity can be transmitted more efficiently in the form of DC current, Datta is working with his team to develop the next frontier in high-voltage DC (HVDC) transmission, based on variants of Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) technology, with a reduced number of components. At the massive scale of the grid, HVDC has become a cornerstone of making renewable energy available to the load centers. GE Vernova is now deploying HVDC converters to help European transmission companies like TenneT deliver electricity from offshore wind farms to the onshore grid. In the U.S., HVDC is also being planned as part of an evolving grid superhighway to expand and modernize the grid and support the country’s goal of producing 100% of its electricity with renewable sources by 2035.
Preaching What He Practices
After years of driving technology, Datta has expanded his focus to driving people. “You have to bring stakeholders with you,” Datta says, and in recent years the annual electrification symposium he hosts at the Niskayuna center changed from a technical conference to a strategic one. He invites speakers from India, China, Australia, and Europe, hosts senior leadership from the Department of Energy, and brings in leaders of the U.S. National Laboratories to focus, he says, on three areas: “one, solving the renewables integration issue; two, making HVDC part of a everyone’s road map; and three, exploring AI’s role in modernizing the grid.”
While excellence in painting and power electronics may both require patience, Datta does not believe that’s a luxury the industry can afford. “I view the people working in this area as being part of another Manhattan Project,” he says, “where you had the best brains in the country coming together to spend two years figuring something out, with no option of quitting. Our time for energy transition is not infinite. My daughter just went to college, and I truly do feel a duty to make her life better and not worse.”
In this effort, the painter turned power technologist is not chasing elegance. “We don’t need a perfect solution. What we need is a solution that works in the time frame we have,” he says. “It should be all hands on deck. We’ve got to make this happen.”