We've seen it used previously, if interested see after the jump.
From Bloomberg, August 7:
The Grid of the Future Needs Wires That Can Carry More Power
“There's just no better way of getting a better return compared to reconductoring,” TS Conductor founder Jason Huang says on this week’s Zero.
Upgrading the grid for a net-zero world isn’t just a matter of building new infrastructure. Yes, miles of additional cables will be needed, as will more transformers, more substations and technicians. But plenty of existing technology will also need a facelift.
That’s where TS Conductor comes in. The Huntington Beach, California-based company (a 2024 BloombergNEF Pioneer) developed a power cable that’s just as strong as the standard wires that have been used for more than a century, but it weighs less and, crucially, can carry as much as three times more electricity.
“Fundamentally, progress in conductors is dependent on material science progress,” Jason Huang, founder of TS Conductor, tells Akshat Rathi on the third episode of Zero’s grid series. But that progress isn’t enough on its own, Huang says. Working with utilities and governments also requires fulfilling a long checklist of demands on factors like safety, reliability and longevity.
Rathi sat down with Huang to talk about the technological breakthroughs that lead him to start TS Conductor, and the market challenges of getting his product onto the grid.
Our transcripts are generated by a combination of software and human editors, and may contain slight differences between the text and audio. Please confirm in audio before quoting in print.
Akshat Rathi 00:00:00
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshat Rathi. This week: breakthroughs on the grid.
If you’re caught up on the last few episodes of Zero, we’ve been talking about the grid. How it so magically brings electricity into our homes. And what it’s going to take to update and upgrade the grid as we electrify more and more of our world.
A good amount of the grid is visible. You’ve seen miles and miles of cables that bring you electricity. More than 30 million miles, actually. But there’s a lot that you don’t see. You don’t see or hear about the people whose labor and ideas make the grid better. So in our third episode, and for now final, episode of the grid series, we look at one such innovation. What if, instead of rolling out new cables, we gave the old ones a high-tech makeover?
Akshat Rathi 00:01:06
I don’t know if there’s — I’m — it’s — I’m sure I’m missing something. It’s just, it makes no sense to me that this is not bendable.
Jason Huang 00:01:12
If you have a sharp edge here, it’s gonna snap. That had been the problem of the older-generation product. When you have the aluminum protecting the carbon core, now you can bend it. It will yield, but it will not snap.
Akshat Rathi 00:01:29
That’s Jason Huang. He has a PhD in materials science, and he’s used that expertise to launch a startup focused on equipping the grid with a new generation of extremely durable cables.
Because we’ll talk a lot about cables in this episode, let me try to tell you a little bit more first. The cables that are deployed for high-voltage transmission, essentially those hanging between pylons, look nothing like a normal wire. It’s not just a bigger version of a cylindrical copper wire covered in insulation, the kind you use for a phone charger. Instead, it’s a steel cable that provides strength to a bunch of insulated aluminum wires that are wound around the steel cable, all of which is then wrapped in insulation.
TS Conductor’s main innovation has been replacing the steel cable core with a carbon fiber core and making circular aluminum cables be trapezoidal in shape. That means they can use the space more efficiently. And Huang tells me these new cables can carry as much as three times more electricity, a game-changer and maybe the first of many big innovations on the grid that will cumulatively have huge impacts.
I sat down with Jason at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London in June to find out more.
Akshat Rathi 00:03:11
Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Huang 00:03:13
Thank you very much. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.
Akshat Rathi 00:03:16
Now there’s a term that I know you are very familiar with, but which listeners may or may not be familiar with: reconductoring. It refers to replacing old transmission lines with sturdy, new high-capacity conductors. And one reason is to make the lines stronger, strong enough to be able to withstand heavy winds, durable enough to have very little sagging, because sagging lines can spark wildfires. But there’s another reason, which has to do with the energy transition. Can you explain what reconductoring is?
Jason Huang 00:03:48
Yeah. Reconductoring typically refers to the need to use a different conductor than the conductor that’s used. This involves two situations. One is you don’t have to retrofit any structure. The other one, you may have to retrofit the structure, make them taller, because there’s a lot more sag or the cross arms of these towers have to be strengthened because you’re using a heavier conductor. And I should add a comment about the reconductoring, why utilities do reconductoring. It is actually principally driven by capacity. They have capacity constraint, a bottleneck for example. So they’re looking at a higher-capacity conductor to de-bottleneck the grid.
Akshat Rathi 00:04:36
Well, but before we get to exploring how exactly TS Conductor solves this problem, let’s go to the basics of what a cable today looks like. Most people think it’s going to be copper that carries electricity, but it’s aluminum. Now, I’m holding a piece of what a TS Conductor wire would look like, and it’s multiple layers of aluminum, and they’re also not round, not all of them. Some of them are flat. So why do we have this kind of structure today and why is it not copper?
Jason Huang 00:05:11
That’s an excellent question. Copper is simply too expensive and too heavy. When you compare copper with aluminum, copper is three times the weight of aluminum and the cost of copper on a per-pound basis is three times the cost of aluminum. So you’re looking at copper versus aluminum, it’s a 9x cost and for a connectivity that is less than 2x, so it’s a lousy tradeoff in terms of using copper for overhead lines.
In terms of traditional conductors, why we use normally round aluminum strand, and steel being round as well — steel wires in the conventional conductor — simply, round is easier to make. But you also leave a lot of space in between these round strands because there are a lot of gaps in there. And that is a poor usage of the conductor space. In the TS configuration, we use trapezoidal wire, and the trap wire gives you a much greater packing density. We can achieve easily 93% packing or more. The round, they’re probably about 73%. So you are able to integrate more aluminum with the trap wire. So it’s a better design, a better way to build a conductor.
Akshat Rathi 00:06:32
Now, when I heard about your company first — and you are in the business of reconductoring, you are in the business of making cables that can carry two or three times as much electricity as cables today do — when I first heard about it, I was surprised that that is something that can be done. You know, I understand you can get some increase in conductance, but two times, three times? Is that surprise normal, or is this an industry secret that just never got out of the industry?....
....MUCH MORE, an excellent interview.
April 11
Grid: How U.S. Electrical Transmission Lines Will Be Rebuilt—Reconductoring
April 15
Electrical Transmission: Speaking Of The Farsighted Italians...
June 14
"The Aging U.S. Power Grid Is About to Get a Jolt"
July 26
Transmission/Grid: Prysmian Has Received A €450 million Contract From The European Investment Bank (PRY:Milan)
Along with a few hundred posts on materials science.
And speaking of farsighted, the first few lines of William Blake's Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour...
How the heck did he figure that out in 1803?
