The carbon fiber conductor production floor at CTC Global’s Irvine, California facility.
This is a time of stress in the electric utility industry as demand escalates. But the way to alleviate it may neither be in new generation nor in new transmission installations. Instead it may be hanging overhead in the wires themselves, known in the industry as conductors.
You can see conductors on poles and pylons, moving power from the place where it was generated to the place where it will be used. Up those poles and on those pylons, a revolution is brewing: Carbon fiber conductors are replacing traditional steel cores around which the aluminum conductor is wound.
This revolution, according to J.D. Sitton, chief executive officer of CTC Global, the world’s largest carbon fiber conductor maker, has taken hold more vigorously in Asia than it has in the United States, but that is changing.
CTC Global is headquartered in Irvine, California. The privately held company makes carbon fiber conductors in Irvine and has additional manufacturing centers in China, India, Indonesia and Paraguay.
It supplies customers in 67 countries. In all, the company says, it has 125,000 miles of lines “up in the air.”
CTC Global has supplied over 40 utilities in the United States and over 300 utilities worldwide with conductors of eight different capacities, bespoke for load and conditions.
Carry Twice As Much Electricity
The primary appeal of carbon fiber conductors is that they carry about twice the amount of electricity as traditional ones with steel cores.
The core doesn’t carry the current but supports the current-carrying aluminum conductor. It provides strength and stability to the line.
Carbon fiber cores are lighter than steel and perform better in the field. For starters, they don’t sag in heat and aren’t subject to corrosion. Pylons for new lines can be spaced farther apart; line loss is lower.
The strength in traditional electric cables comes from wound steel rods forming a core around which the aluminum conductor is wrapped.
With carbon fiber, as exemplified by CTC Global’s trademarked product line, ACCC (Aluminum Conductor Composite Core), the core is made up of strands of aircraft-standard carbon fiber wound tightly with fiberglass, and including an optic fiber strand that can be used to monitor the conductor and alert the utility to malfunctions or wildfires.
For CTC Global, business is good. As Sitton explained, a utility under pressure can’t wait 10 to 15 years to build a new line, so reconductoring makes sense.
This has been the case in Asia, where the need for power is possibly even greater than it is in the United States. In Bangladesh, Sitton said a significant portion of the electric grid uses carbon fiber conductors.
“Traditionally, what has driven our business are utilities that need large capacity added to their grids quickly. They had a need for speed, and they didn’t have the capital to do all they wanted to do at once,” Sitton explained.
He added, “So we developed our product to enable the utilities with these capacity problems to be able to address them in months rather than years, at a fraction of the cost.”
Sitton said in India, CTC’s Global product is deployed in 23 of them.
Small and Large Utilities Add Carbon Fiber
American utilities are catching up — small and large utilities are now using carbon fiber conductors. Among them are American Electric Power, Alabama Power, Arizona Public Service, National Grid, and Southern California Edison.
CTC Global, Sitton said, is the beneficiary of the data center boom and they have seen data center-related business jump 100 percent in the past year.
This increase is part of a general surge in utility use and interest in carbon fiber cores. They have become a path to survival for many utilities as they grapple with regulatory uncertainty and rising demand. Reconductoring is less irksome to achieve than new construction.
While the initial cost is higher, that is soon overtaken by savings all along the way with carbon fiber, from reduced line losses to more power coming through each conductor, Sitton said.
Where do carbon fiber conductors have no advantage? Sitton said there is no benefit in using them in undersea and underground transmission.
CTC Global’s Irvine plant operates almost around the clock: 24 hours a day during the week and on a modified schedule on weekends. Spools of the materials are loaded on one end of the production lines and travel under tension through a series of winding stations.
Central to the operation is what the company likes to call its “secret sauce,” an epoxy bath that binds the strands together and protects them, said Samson Namala, director of global manufacturing.
Rows of winding stations are monitored by staffers alert to any problems, inconsistencies or quality issues. No blemishes or imperfections can be allowed; the conductors will be operating in weather for many decades.
Perfection is imperative. The future hangs on it, you might say.
