The Story of Reactive Technologies: The Company Building Telescopes for Power Grids

The Story of Reactive Technologies: The Company Building Telescopes for Power Grids

The engineering team at Reactive Technologies had a problem. They were trying to send data signals through the entire UK power grid, and something was blocking their transmission. The signal wasn’t reaching all their receiver devices at the same time, and it bothered them.

What they discovered in that frustration would become the foundation for an entirely new category of grid measurement technology—one that had never existed before because the phenomenon they were measuring had never been measured. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Borrett, CEO and co-founder of Reactive Technologies, shared how an accidental discovery in 2009 led to a company that’s raised over 80 million dollars and is helping power grids worldwide manage the transition to renewable energy.

From Semiconductors to Power Grids

Marc’s path to grid measurement began in an entirely different industry. His first company operated in semiconductors, developing technology for near field communication—the technology that lets you tap your phone to pay for things or board a subway.

The insight that led to Reactive Technologies came from seeing parallels between two massive infrastructure transitions. “The first company I co-founded was in semiconductors, and we were developing technology for near field communication,” Marc explains. “We saw the energy transition as being very similar to the kind of transition that the telecom sector went through from fixed line telephony to effectively voice over IP.”

The parallel was striking. “The energy sector was going from big power stations, pumping power down the wires into homes and businesses to now power being generated in homes and businesses and flowing the other way,” Marc notes. “So we saw that there were many similarities with the telecom sector, and if we brought that skillset to the energy sector, we might just be able to do things a bit differently and have better results.”

This cross-pollination of expertise would prove crucial. When Marc assembled his team, they all came from telecom. That outside perspective let them ask questions that energy sector insiders might never consider.

The Accidental Breakthrough

The company’s founding insight emerged from an experiment that wasn’t supposed to be about measurement at all. Marc’s telecom-trained engineers wanted to explore whether the power grid could function as a communications channel.

“We did a first project with a power grid operator in the UK, where we said we would send data through the entirety of the UK grid,” Marc recalls. “And to do that, we had to build something to create that data signal. And then we had to create some devices to hear and decode that signal out of all of the noise of all of the generation assets on the grid.”

They succeeded in transmitting the signal. But then they noticed something strange. “When we looked at our data that we found that our signal didn’t travel and get received by each of the measurement or receiver devices as they were then at exactly the same time. And that bothered our engineers.”

The investigation revealed something unexpected. “When they looked into it, they found that there was something that was inhibiting our signal getting through the grid. And that thing that was inhibiting it was the stability of the grid. So, basically, we found that the more stable the grid was, it was harder for us to get our message through where the grid was weaker and less stable. It was easier for us to get our message through.”

This observation sparked a pivot that would define the company’s future. “We went back to the grid operator, and we said, look, we could turn this on its head and we could measure stability in real time. Would that be of interest? And that was really where we actually got started with measuring grid stability.”

Why the Grid Needs New Eyes

To understand why Reactive Technologies’ measurement capability matters, Marc offers a thought experiment about technological progress. If you brought back Alexander Graham Bell and Nikolai Tesla from history and showed Bell a modern smartphone while showing Tesla the power industry, “Alexander Graham Bell would not recognize what you’ve given him as a phone, but obviously, Nikolai Tesla would have a fairly good understanding of what was actually still going on in the power industry.”

The energy sector’s stability served it well for 120 years. Burning coal, gas, and nuclear provided predictable generation. But the renewable transition changes everything.

“Those kind of stable generation sources are being replaced by things that are much more intermittent. A solar farm only produces power when the sun’s out. A wind farm only produces power when it’s windy,” Marc explains. “And fundamentally that changes how the power system actually behaves.”

The old toolkit can’t keep up. “The toolkit that exists is based on the old world, where everything is entirely stable, so very little is measured, but lots of things are modeled. And now, as this transition takes hold, those models are no longer keeping up with the reality of how the power system is behaving.”

Real-time measurement fills this gap, giving grid operators the data they need to manage increasingly complex, intermittent energy sources while keeping the lights on.

Five Years in the Wilderness

The path from breakthrough insight to meaningful revenue tested every reserve of patience Marc possessed. When asked how long it took to start generating core revenue, his answer reveals the reality of selling into critical infrastructure: “In the order of five and a half years.”

Those weren’t years spent perfecting the technology in isolation. They were years of intense technical scrutiny from potential customers who needed absolute certainty before allowing any new technology near their grids.

“The first kind of conversations we had in the very early days were all about, are you sure you’re not going to black out the power grid if we allow you to do this, we don’t want to have any problems,” Marc recalls. “So how can you prove to us if we allow you to do this measurement, you’re not going to upset damage temporarily or permanently destroy the power system?”

The scrutiny was brutal but necessary. “It did take a high degree of technical persuasion, justification, explanation just to be able to get a first small scale pilot started for obviously the right reasons. But as a startup, that’s very challenging.”

Marc is candid about the psychological toll: “It is tough and it is bleak and it is lonely. You know, I’m not going to start crying but it is genuinely difficult. But you have to believe and as long as you know you’ve got the right solution to the right problem then that is the fire that you’ve got to keep alight and that’s the fire that you got to stoke.”

What sustained him was watching the problem grow. Their first customer spent about 16 million pounds annually on the challenge Reactive Technologies addressed. “Over the next five years, as we were working with them and we were going from a small scale pilot to a bigger scale to then a national scale, that problem grew fivefold. So 16 million turned into 32 million and eventually got to somewhere north of 250 million in that time period.”

Building the Telescope

Looking ahead, Marc’s vision extends beyond solving operational problems to enabling fundamental scientific understanding. He draws inspiration from the history of scientific instruments.

“You sort of chronicle how we’ve evolved our scientific understanding based on how well we are at building tools to understand science. So, you know, whether that’s a telescope to look at the universe or whether it’s a microscope to look at organisms or other particles, the better the microscope or the better the telescope, the more you can understand and the more you can evolve your approaches to challenges,” Marc explains.

Reactive Technologies aims to become that telescope for power grids. “We very much now look at our measurement system as more like that kind of telescope. We want to understand how the power grid actually works in a way that conventionally hasn’t been able to be understood before.”

The renewable transition creates unprecedented challenges that demand this deeper understanding. “We’re seeing levels of change on the power system that haven’t been seen before, and we want to try and evolve our telescope to look deeper and further into the power grid and to really see things that others haven’t seen before.”

This scientific instrument approach opens new possibilities. “That will, in turn, we believe, open up further opportunities for better services, to make better decisions, to enable more renewable energy to run safely on the power grid.”

The journey from accidental discovery to building scientific instruments for the energy transition embodies a particular kind of entrepreneurial vision—one that values fundamental understanding over quick wins, that builds categories rather than features, and that measures success in decades rather than quarters. For Marc and Reactive Technologies, creating the tools to see what was previously invisible isn’t just about building a company. It’s about enabling the infrastructure transition that will define the next century of human progress.