What we talked about
Bert Wank, CEO of infiniRel, shares his journey in power semiconductors and renewable energy, focusing on innovative solutions for grid reliability. He discusses infiniRel’s mission to develop advanced monitoring systems, likened to an “EKG for electronics,” to detect potential failures in inverters used in solar plants and battery storage systems. Wank explores the challenges of integrating modern electronics with traditional power grids, emphasizing the need for harmony in complex systems. He also touches on the financial impact of inverter failures, costing the U.S. solar industry billions, and infiniRel’s predictive analytics to mitigate these losses. Wank shares insights on professional fulfillment through the Japanese concept of Ikigai and offers advice for young engineers passionate about energy and electronics.
Show notes
Bert Wank’s starting point for infiniRel was a single statistic from a Department of Energy presentation: inverter failures account for 59% of all unexpected maintenance costs in a solar plant. His answer was to build what he calls an EKG for electronics:a system that reads the “wiggles” in an electrical signal the way a cardiologist reads arrhythmias, catching failures before they happen rather than after the smoke appears.
What we covered
- Traditional condition-based maintenance:the kind used on aircraft turbines and industrial motors for 40 years:relies on heat, vibration, smell, and sound as warning signs. With electronics, Wank points out, all of those signals arrive after it’s already too late. A semiconductor fails in under a microsecond; by the time anything is visible or audible, the component is destroyed.
- The grid’s move from rotating steam generators to solar and wind inverters has introduced a fundamental fragility: legacy generators carry enough mechanical inertia to absorb disruptions, while semiconductor-based inverters have voltage margins of only 20-30%. A spike that a copper-and-steel machine would shrug off can blow a chip in less than a microsecond. The 2025 Spain blackout, Wank notes, was a live example of a grid going out of harmony with no feedback mechanism in time to correct it.
- infiniRel’s EKG monitors the fingerprint of electrical disturbances and accumulates digital stress readings to estimate how close a component is to failure. When the threshold is crossed, the system raises an alarm. The current product targets large battery energy storage systems:which run 24/7, unlike solar plants that only operate between sunrise and sunset:and solar operators in the field.
- The US solar industry lost $4.5 billion in preventable losses in 2023, the majority from inverters that stopped operating, sometimes catastrophically. Wank frames the economic case for predictive analytics directly: uptime is revenue, and the financial tail when a plant goes offline:lost generation plus potential penalties:is long.
- Wank’s roadmap calls for shrinking the EKG from its current large-format field device to a chip-level solution embedded directly on the printed circuit board. At that scale, the system becomes intrinsically safe:able to monitor and control the power electronics from inside, rather than from outside. He is also in active conversations about data centers in space, where the logistics of replacing a satellite make early failure prediction a mission-critical requirement.
- On advice for young engineers, Wank invokes the Japanese concept of Ikigai:the overlap of what you are good at, what you are passionate about, what the world needs, and what someone will pay you for. He argues that energy and power electronics sit squarely in that overlap right now, and that understanding both analog and digital systems is increasingly a rare and valuable combination.
About Bert Wank
Bert Wank is the CEO and founder of infiniRel, a startup developing predictive analytics for power electronics in renewable energy systems. He has a background in power semiconductors and has previously served on the board of directors of a capacitor manufacturer.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bertwank
- Website: https://www.infiniRel.com
Episode 29 of the PreVetted Podcast.