Innovation at Powerspan
Powerspan was founded on the mission of developing and deploying proprietary air pollution control technology for the electric power industry. Since our company’s inception in 1994, we continue to dedicate our resources to developing and commercializing advanced, clean energy technologies by investing considerably in Research and Development. We closely collaborate with our customers to ensure our development efforts result in scalable, reliable, cost-effective solutions.
Today, we are considered a leading provider of carbon capture technology, despite our relatively brief history and modest R&D expenditures compared to our much larger competitors that have been in existence for many decades and have annual R&D budgets totaling in the billions.
Innovation has thrived at Powerspan in large part due to our technically agile, creative, and disciplined culture. In comparison, large companies generally make decisions based on conventional wisdom, which usually results in incremental improvements to existing product lines. Breakthrough innovations require one to think outside of convention and take risks, acting in ways that could threaten a profitable business line. As Clayton Christenson points out in The Innovators Dilemma, the actions required to create disruptive technologies are nearly impossible for the well-established company to undertake.
Another reason for Powerspan’s leading position in the emerging CO2 capture market is that suppliers of air pollution control equipment have not been in the technology development business for decades. The basic technologies used to capture SO2 and NOX from commercial pulverized coal-fired power plants (calcium-based scrubbing for SO2 and ammonia-based selective catalytic reduction for NOX) were first developed and commercialized in Europe and Japan over 30 years ago. The process engineering know-how and R&D skills needed to develop such technologies have largely disappeared from traditional equipment suppliers. The air pollution control equipment market today is a commodity market dominated by large companies with very little product differentiation.
By comparison, during Powerspan’s entire existence, we have been in the product development business. As we expanded our vision of our product offering—as with our ECO technology, which we designed as an integrated system to compete directly with the best available control technologies for capture of SO2, NOX, mercury, and particulate matter—we necessarily had to develop critical skill sets in order to succeed. These skills— 1) disciplined approach to lab testing, measurement, and analysis, 2) sophisticated process modeling, including the development of new models based on proprietary empirical data, and 3) critical thinking skills including the ability to find innovative solutions when the inevitable road blocks were encountered—are not easily developed or acquired. We believe this skill set is unique in our industry and we’ve been at it long enough to become quite proficient, readily surpassing the well-known 10,000-hour rule for mastering a profession (see Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success).
Lastly, Powerspan’s senior technical leaders all started their professional careers in the U.S. Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP) with three working together at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard through the 1980s and 1990s. The legendary Admiral Rickover, who founded the NNPP and served in its leadership role for over 30 years, established a well-deserved reputation for technical discipline. The program’s rigorous standards are ingrained in participants at all levels, and the resulting culture of constant and sometimes pointedly direct questioning, challenging, and checking becomes second nature. Having this common background and approach to technical work and problem solving has been a key to our technical success.
Creative Minds Working for Breakthrough Solutions®