When the power lines stretching between towers get too hot, because of both the current they carry and weather conditions, they expand and sag. But because these lines have to maintain a minimum overhead distance from the ground for electrical safety, they cannot sag too much.
Many of the conductors on the market today, for example, have an upper temperature limit of around 80 degrees Celsius (176 Fahrenheit), which, depending on the conductor, could mean the line is carrying a maximum of 1000 amps of current. More than that, and they get too hot and begin to sag, which limits the conductors’ capacity.
AssetCool, a UK-based startup founded in 2018, has engineered a coating to cool off power lines. The coating, which is photonic and lowers a conductor’s temperature by both reflecting solar radiation and emitting heat at the same time, is applied on existing power lines by small robots crawling along them. Niall Coogan, AssetCool’s co-founder and CEO, told Latitude Media in an exclusive interview that it can increase their capacity by up to 30%.
“If a conventional conductor has an upper temperature limit of around 80 degrees, the application of our coating would allow that to operate at 60 degrees with the same current level,” Coogan said. “So you can increase the current capacity before you reach that upper temperature limit.”
Today, AssetCool announced the closing of a more than $13.6 million (10 million GBP) Series A funding round led by Energy Impact Partners, with participation from Extantia Capital, Taronga Group, and Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.
The announcement comes at a time when skyrocketing energy demand has the energy industry looking for cheap and fast ways to unlock more grid capacity; so the potential for a 30% capacity increase could be really valuable to potential AssetCool customers.
“This generational increase in electricity demand around data centers, electrification of transport and heat, and the pace of load increases outstripping the ability to increase transmission and distribution is an urgent driver,” Coogan said, adding that increasing ambient temperatures and renewables penetration are also exacerbating capacity challenges.
‘Static line uprating’
There are, of course, other ways to solve power lines’ capacity and temperature challenges. The most obvious one is replacing existing transmission lines with larger or more advanced ones, such as carbon core advanced conductors, which have a higher current carrying capacity and are able to run at 180 degrees C instead of 80.
“If you are an operator and you want to increase the capacity of your line, you have the opportunity to physically modify it,” Coogan noted. “But that’s on the order of $600,000 per mile and it will take three to seven years to execute. That’s going to be essential for many instances where you need that 100% increase in capacity, but it’s not an urgent, immediate solution that can drive the response to the demand.”
There’s also dynamic line rating, where grid-enhancing technologies use sensors and machine learning to measure weather conditions and the lines’ temperature to adjust the conductors’ capacity. In the case of DLR, however, the increase in capacity is still tied to weather conditions, which makes it challenging to achieve at scale, according to Coogan.
“You have the heavy intervention approach, which is reconductoring, and then you have the more retrofittable approach, which is dynamic line rating,” Coogan said. “We occupy a pretty unique space where we’re physically increasing the capacity of the line in a retrofittable way. The increase in capacity we give is continuous.”
Coogan calls AssetCool’s approach “static line uprating.” The coating can also be used in combination with both dynamic line rating and reconductoring. In fact, according to Coogan, it works particularly well with advanced conductors.
Moving forward
So far, AssetCool has deployed its robots for tens of kilometers of lines in Canada, South Asia, and Europe, a number that Coogan expects will rise to hundreds of kilometers in the next few months. The company is pursuing a hybrid revenue model, which includes both project-based services and partnerships with EPC contractors.
The startup has a series of active but yet undisclosed pilot projects, and it is planning a multi-step entry into the U.S. market, which Coogan said is particularly attractive due to its unique surge in energy requirements.
Moving forward, Coogan anticipates the company’s main challenge will be “operational rollout at scale.”
“This is a new technology with multiple areas of expertise and interdependent components, so operational delivery at scale is our greatest challenge,” he said. “We don’t experience any demand issues.”
But the potential of the intersection of material science and robotics for power lines specifically is “huge,” according to Coogan. For example, the company has also developed a coating able to mitigate power lines’ noise, which is a problem in heavily populated areas.
“There is a pretty endless series of tasks and issues that we can begin to resolve,” Coogan said.
