Alan Ross: I am Alan Ross at DistribuTech 2025 in Dallas and my next guest, I am delighted to say, is Javiera McGuiggan, the Global Head of Power Systems, Bioindustrials at Cargill. Javi, since the last time we talked I see that you have changed job titles, correct? Tell me a little about that.
Javiera McGuiggan: Bioindustrials, as an area of Cargill, takes the food-derived products, sometimes bio replacement of things, such as oils or starches, and it turns them into industrial applications. For instance, we use oils to make candles, foams for mattresses or for shoe insoles. We can take starches to make fiber glass or the pink insulation that goes inside of the walls. There are a lot of other applications as well. The latest thing that I am working on, though, is cooling for data centers, especially AI data centers. They get very hot, so cooling those down is a new area for the oils, for these bio-based oils. It takes more power to cool down the equipment than to power it. That whole equation is hard for any city that wants to open their doors to data centers.
Alan Ross: I just heard a speech by Rachel Williams, from Southern Company, where she held up her cell phone, and she said, “the amount of power that it takes to run a Google search on here, is a thousand times more powerful when you do an AI search. It takes that much more power”.
Javiera McGuiggan: That’s why these chips are getting a higher and higher concentration of watts per chip, and they are also trying to make them smaller for efficiency, which generates a lot of heat.
Alan Ross:There is a lot changing in the power industry. FR3, I know, is experiencing rapid growth everywhere in the world. Focus on that. Why and how are you handling it?
Javiera McGuiggan: This category, in the last three years, for us has more than doubled the volumes globally, everywhere, and is very much driven by solar and wind. Not only is it because we logically align with a shared mission, of doing more of a bio, friendlier-to-the-earth solution, that is one piece, but because inverters in solar and wind generate transients and harmonics. Harmonics generate partial discharge, which creates hydrogen.
The hydrogen released in a transformer is very dangerous. It is a safety issue. FR3 has two properties that help in that; one is that it has a much higher partial discharge inception voltage, which reduces the release of partial discharge, and it also has double bonds, where it traps these hydrogen molecules, much like it does with water.
Alan Ross: That is the same FR3 that you supply today?
Javiera McGuiggan: Yes, for reducing partial discharge in renewable energy applications, both wind and solar, it is purely the same FR3 as always. We have been successfully doing that just by doing a retro-fill to a normal transformer with mineral oil and replacing it with FR3, which solves the problem.
Alan Ross: What innovations are you working on for the future?
Javiera McGuiggan: One innovation that we are researching for FR3 in the future is working on larger sizes of transformers, moving on to larger power units. They have more of an issue with stray gassing, and that is one of the things that we are working on to improve.
Alan Ross: Harmonics and transients created by distributed energy resources, particularly wind and solar, is creating a problem for power quality at the grid edge, right? The solution that you just mentioned impacts the power quality, which impacts the grid.
Javiera McGuiggan: Yes, it impacts the whole grid; resilience, stability, reliability, and especially when you have operations like these where we don’t realize it, but our life depends on these data centers now. All this AI tech-nology uses even more power and data, and it is keeping the whole world running. FR3 is a solution that makes the whole grid more robust.
Alan Ross: Let’s talk about partial discharge and inception voltage.
Javiera McGuiggan: Inception voltage in natural esters like FR3 has a higher value so it helps control those partial discharges much better. We just presented a poster at the American Clean Power recently.
Alan Ross: We recently had a fire right outside of Heathrow Airport that disrupted travel for a whole day. Talk a little bit about that and how FR3 might have helped.
Javiera McGuiggan: It is always tough for us because we never want to imply in any way that we are gloating about someone else’s tragedy, right? We are thankful that this time we did not have any casualties, but over 300,000 people were impacted. One of the largest airports in the world closed for 18 hours because their substation was out of operation. While we do not know the cause yet, since it is under investigation, it seems to be an overloading that generated a failure, hence the explosion.
It was a 25 metric ton size of transformer. Once a fire starts in mineral oil, it must burn all the fluid off, just like when a car explodes, it keeps burning until the fuel is gone. It is sad for us because we know that can be avoided. That doesn’t need to happen anymore.
The estimate of the total cost, at least the current ones that I have heard, just for the cost and disruptions is over $100 million so far, not counting personal disruptions, things you miss that you can’t get back, airlines compensating people, over a thousand canceled flights.
While fires are not that common, they do happen. The cost we have for the disruption of power to people, to a city, or in this case, a giant airport, is huge. And the biggest point is, it can be avoided. It doesn’t need to keep happening.
Alan Ross: In the reliability world, we look at risk factors, as we consider both the likelihood of a failure and the severity of a failure. Transformer fires have a very low likelihood of failure but have an extremely high severity of that failure.
Javiera McGuiggan: People forget it is an explosion. It breaks or destroys your whole substation if you have one unit that fails. I hope, Alan, for the future, in some very delicate operations, such as airports, that we might have little more of a sensitivity to thinking about these new solutions. Think of things like state parks, which is something close to my heart. How horrible. We have already seen fires in California for whatever reason those happened. But if you have a beautiful monument or a state park, that has transformers, why don’t we take care of at least those symbolic, very important, or people gathering places?
You have big transformers installed in childcare places and parks, which are the least of the places where you want any of these tragedies to happen. I hope those more sensitive applications get a little more attention because of this sad example of what happened at Heathrow. In general, no one likes to lose power, and we are all exposed to it, but at least some applications I feel, are more sensitive than others, and I hope we make some progress in those.
Alan Ross: As the Global Head of the Bioindustrials, what is next for you and what is next for Cargill?
Javiera McGuiggan: We are working on some improvements for possibly a future version of FR3 only dedicated to power units, controlling stray gases. That is one of our possibilities. We are working on a synthetic fluid for Europe and overall, we are dramatically expanding our footprint.
We are opening new plants in the next two years, which will give us ten around the world and doubling the size of the ones we already have. It is a fast-paced expansion. We are trying to work closer with insurance companies, like FM Global and other insurance companies. I feel those could be our best allies to really tell the story where these accidents don’t need to happen.
Alan Ross: Javi, as always, it has been a pleasure to speak with you.
Javiera McGuiggan: It is always a pleasure, Alan. Thank you so much.
