Startup nabs $60M for high-tech cables to help speed clean energy rollout

To help the energy transition happen faster, the high-voltage power lines crisscrossing the U.S. will need a high-tech upgrade. Recent federal and state regulations are calling on utilities to deploy a new generation of cables to get that done — and the companies making the necessary tech are gearing up to meet an expected increase in demand.

On Wednesday, TS Conductor raised $60 million to finance a significant expansion of its U.S. manufacturing capacity for its advanced conductors. Made of aluminum surrounding a carbon composite core, these cables are lighter, stronger, and capable of carrying more electricity than the aluminum-and-steel cables that are used across most of the grid.

Those advantages more than make up for TS Conductor’s higher price per meter compared with that of industry-standard cables, according to its CEO, Jason Huang. In fact, their use can lead to an overall reduction in the total cost of building new transmission corridors, he said.

Most of those expenses are tied up in building the massive towers that hold power cables aloft, not in the cables themselves, Huang noted. Lighter and more-efficient advanced conductors require fewer and less robustly built towers to carry the same or a greater amount of electricity as traditional towers and cables.

Advanced conductors are also particularly well suited to ​“reconductoring” projects — replacing old cables on existing transmission towers. The tech can double to triple the transmission capacity of those existing corridors, providing utilities and regulators with an alternative to securing rights-of-way and building new towers across hundreds of miles of land. Building transmission from scratch can take up to or more than a decade from conception to completion, and is often stymied by permitting and legal challenges.

Since its inaugural U.S. deployment with Montana-Dakota Utilities, in 2021, TS Conductor has been working with the federally owned power company Tennessee Valley Authority, Arizona utility Arizona Public Service, and other U.S. utilities, Huang said. It has also largely maxed out its production capacity at the Southern California factory it opened in 2023.

Most of the $60 million TS Conductor just raised is aimed at opening a new, much larger factory at an as yet unnamed location in the Eastern U.S. ​“This is all about ​‘how do we accelerate the pace of TS Conductor adoption?’” Huang told Canary Media this week. ​“We’re very lucky that we have these utility investors supporting TS, and making that bet on the direction of technology in the future.”

While Huang declined to say where the new factory would be or when it would open, he did say it would have roughly 10 times the 5,000-miles-per-year production capacity of its Southern California facility.

TS Conductor is backed by some big players in the transmission field. Along with lead investor Wellington Management and early-stage investor Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the Series B funding round included the venture arm of utility National Grid; U.S. utility holding company Edison International; a subsidiary of leading U.S. renewable energy developer NextEra Energy Resources; and Quanta Services, a major transmission project engineering and management firm.

TS Conductor isn’t the only advanced conductor manufacturer raising new capital to meet the needs of the grid. In February, CTC Global raised an undisclosed amount of money from Endeavour Capital and Greenbelt Capital Partners to expand production of its aluminum-conductor composite core (ACCC) cables. This technology, which is similar to but an older design than its TS Conductor counterpart, promises similar capacity and efficiency benefits, and has been installed by more than 250 utilities in 60 countries.

The promise of advanced conductors — and what’s holding them back 

The U.S. transmission network sorely needs more capacity.

The pace of transmission-grid expansion has slowed over the past two decades, particularly for the longer-range power lines needed to carry renewable energy from where it’s most efficiently generated to electricity-hungry population centers. As a result, hundreds of gigawatts worth of proposed wind and solar farms and large-scale battery projects are now languishing in yearslong grid interconnection waiting lists. Those that do win interconnection rights are often saddled with multimillion-dollar grid-upgrade costs.

In April, energy consulting firm GridLab and the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley released studies that found that using advanced conductors to replace existing transmission lines could quadruple the current pace of utility transmission grid capacity expansion by 2035, all while reducing the cost of that buildout.

This gap between the growing grid needs and the slowing pace of deployment is driving policymakers to focus attention on technologies that can more quickly expand the capacity of the existing U.S. transmission network. The U.S. Department of Energy named advanced conductors as one of a set of ​“innovative grid deployments” that utilities and regulators must quickly implement to solve the country’s transmission challenges. Several advanced conductor projects were included in the 58 projects that won a collective $3.5 billion in DOE grants last year.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also ordered utilities and grid planners to consider advanced conductors and other ​“advanced transmission technologies” as part of the long-term grid planning and interconnection reforms it has approved over the past two years. And lawmakers in states including California, Minnesota, Montana, New York, and Virginia have passed or are considering laws giving state utility regulators authority to order utilities to consider advanced conductors and other grid-enhancing technologies as part of their grid plans and investments.

Why do regulators need to step in to require U.S. utilities to consider a technology that’s better than the traditional alternatives? Industry experts have pointed to a number of factors.

First, utilities tend to prefer tried-and-true technologies to new alternatives out of fear that untested technologies may cause reliability problems. But advanced conductors aren’t new — the GridLab and UC Berkeley report noted that technologies such as CTC Global’s ACCC have been in use for more than two decades.

Perhaps a greater barrier is the ​“cost of service” regulatory structure under which almost all U.S. utilities operate. Under this structure, utilities are allowed to collect a guaranteed rate of return — a steady and predictable flow of revenue — on the cost of capital investments such as transmission projects. But cost-of-service regulations tend not to reward utilities for investing in reducing operational costs, such as using advanced conductors and other technologies that improve the efficiency of their existing grids.

These regulatory imperatives give utilities an incentive to maximize their capital investments, and a disincentive to consider alternatives that would reduce those revenues — even if the alternatives are better for consumers and the energy system. To date, the relatively small number of U.S. projects using advanced conductors have been in circumstances where traditional transmission technologies and designs simply weren’t a practical option.

Laws and regulations that require utilities to consider advanced conductors are important for the tech to be brought into wider use, Huang said. But ​“we need to advocate for having a mechanism that makes the utility a winner as well,” he said, by restructuring utility incentives to reward them for achieving the cost and efficiency benefits that advanced conductors can deliver.