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If you don't like the idea of a backhoe ripping across your landscaping and parking lots to replace your 20kV direct-bury power cable, Novinium's chemical treatment is an alternative.

Program notes

The phrase "ageing grid infrastructure" conjures images of high-tension steel towers. But many miles of distribution lines are underground, and some are owned by private-sector businesses -- possibly yours.

Your campus could be criss-crossed with cable that's in danger of crumbling and costing you consierable capital to correct. Novinium Inc. has been able to rejuvinate millions of feet of underground power lines by injecting chemicals. Novinium CEO Glen Bertini explains the process he helped to invent.

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Transcript

Denis Du Bois: Glen, welcome to the program.

Glen Bertini: Thank you.

Denis: In that brief introduction I greatly oversimplified what your company does, so will you give us your own explanation -- the one for non-engineers?

Glen Bertini: Sure. Buried cables have an aluminum core that actually carries the electrons to an individual’s home so they can run their lights, toasters, or microwave ovens. Surrounding that aluminum core is a piece of plastic that keeps the voltage in. That plastic is what has degraded over time and the silicon that we inject repairs the damage of that aging.

Denis: How big a cable are we talking about?

Glen Bertini: There are typically 7 or 19 aluminum strands. They might be the size of your little finger; that would be a typical size of the aluminum portion, and then the plastic that wraps around it makes it twice as big.

Denis: How much voltage do these typically carry?

Glen Bertini: 7,000 to 20,000 volts. It’s a very dangerous voltage level. If people were to touch that, they would most certainly get injured or potentially even die.

Denis: Utilities have buried cable like this, and so do telecom companies. Who else has this problem?

Glen Bertini: Besides power utilities, there are a lot of businesses and public institutions that have their own buried networks. Examples would be universities and factories; sometimes some major developments might have privately owned networks as opposed to the utility owning the networks. Those kinds of groups might also have these distribution voltage cables.

Denis: And the owners can avoid digging up and replacing a lot of expensive cable, obviously. Are there other benefits to rejuvenating these cables instead of just replacing them?

Glen Bertini: The first big advantage that’s obvious is, if you don’t have to dig up those cables you’re probably going to save a lot of cost. Typically the cost to treat a cable is a small fraction, a half to a fifth of the cost, of replacing the cable.

One of the reasons that it’s so much less expensive is because it’s much faster to perform. That means that the skilled craft labor, who can deal with 7,000 to 20,000 volts, spends less time and that makes it inherently safer in a very dangerous job. The less time you have to spend around the high voltage, the less people are likely to get hurt.

Also, not digging up cable means less disruption to pavement and landscaping where these cables are typically buried. Finally, there is a huge environmental benefit, especially because direct-buried cables are typically abandoned in place. That means all that aluminum, copper and plastic is in essence thrown away. What we do is recycle that and get another 40 years of life out of it.

Denis: And you've done this for utilities, actually around the world, but quite a few projects across the United States...

Glen Bertini: Yes, and in the very near future, I think in November and December, we’ll be injecting some cables that belong to a fertilizer plant in Woodward, Texas called Terra Industries.

Glen Bertini: The first thing you do is de-energize those energized cables so that nobody gets hurt. Once you have the cables de-energized, you install special fittings on both ends of each cable. Then you hook up, in essence, a pump or a tank to the cable end and start pushing the fluids through the cable. Depending on the length of the cable, it typically takes about 30 minutes or maybe an hour for the fluid to flow the length. You close off both ends and then you can put the cable back in service at that point.

Denis: With all the projects you’ve done, do you know how many thousands of feet of cable you’ve treated so far?

Glen Bertini: Somewhere between 78 million and 80 million feet of cable have been treated over the last two decades.

Denis: How many more million of feet are still down there waiting to be rejuvenated?

Glen Bertini: In North America alone, at utilities alone, there’s in excess of 2.2 billion feet left to go. So that’s excluding privately owned utility systems and excluding the entire rest of the world. So you could probably double or triple that number to get a sense for the global number of miles or millions of feet of cable that need to be injected, or rejuvenated, or rehabilitated one way or another. Let’s say 6 billion feet.

Denis: You’re going to be at this for awhile.

Glen Bertini: That’s the plan.

Denis: Glen Bertini, CEO of Novinium in Seattle Washington, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Glen Bertini: Thank you, sir.