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Amokabel’s innovative New Generation Covered Conductor reaches 500,000 metres delivered in Australia since 2020. Many communities now have a safer, more resilient and reliable power supply as a result.
Amokabel is proud to announce that its New Generation Covered Conductor solution has reached the milestone of 500,000m delivered to Australia since 2020. This represents a major step forward in the resilience, reliability and safety of Australian distribution networks.
Amokabel’s New Generation Covered Conductor (NGCC) has been widely used overseas for many years but is relatively new in the Australian market. This is due to the fact that until Amokabel developed its CCSX products specifically for Australia, there were no standard Covered Conductor products available on the market that were suitable for Australian conditions. Australia poses unique challenges for Covered Conductor in terms of the physical environment and climate change is only exacerbating those challenges. Products developed for European or American applications are designed for conditions that are nowhere near as demanding as those experienced by Covered Conductors in Australia. Amokabel’s superior design and quality have been recognised by many countries, including India where approximately seven million metres of Amokabel Covered Conductor have been delivered in the last few years alone. In a world first, Amokabel has also delivered 110kV Covered Conductor to India.
Unique Operating Environment
Due to the unique operating environment, the design brief from Australia for Amokabel’s NGCC was extensive and covered key areas such as high temperature fluctuations, extreme UV resistance, resistance to salt spray and industrial contaminants, abrasion resistance, as well as the ability for the products to be easily installed and maintained in remote locations. It also needed to be highly cost effective in order to reduce conductor replacement costs and was unique in that Amokabel designed a Covered Conductor replacement for steel wire, commonly used in SWER applications.
New Generation Covered Conductor (NGCC) from Amokabel uses advances in materials technology to produce a covered conductor that is uniquely engineered for Australian conditions. NGCC is much lighter and stronger than other types of covered conductor that have previously been used in Australia (for example CCT). The fact that it is lighter and stronger allows it to be retrofitted to most existing networks without the need for expensive interpoling or other infrastructure upgrades, which are often required when using other solutions such as CCT. The addition of the unique steel (ACS) covered conductor product enables the replacement of conductors where traditionally steel wire has been used. The Amokabel ACS product allows much longer spans than have previously been possible with covered conductor.
In addition to the conductor itself, Amokabel supplies accessories that ensure that a complete covered system solution is achieved. This reduces the risk of fire starts by a staggering 98 percent compared to bare wire and ensures that vegetation and our native wildlife are no longer the unwitting causes of devastating bushfires and unnecessary power outages. An added benefit is that the accessories are very easy to use, ensuring that a minimum amount of training for line crews is required and that the installation time for NGCC is basically the same as for ordinary bare wire.
As part of the commitment by Amokabel to the Australian networks, Amokabel acquired a cable manufacturing business in Sydney in 2022, with the long-term goal of manufacturing covered conductor in Australia. Amokabel’s managing director in Australia, Steve Rutland, commented on the recent acquisition:
“Amokabel’s new generation covered conductors are a uniquely Australian product that has enormous potential to reduce bushfire risk and increase the safety, reliability and resilience of our distribution networks here in Australia. Amokabel believes in being local and where many companies are moving manufacturing offshore, we are committed to providing better service to our customers by bringing manufacturing to Australia and creating jobs here in Australia. Amokabel’s motto is “Cable for Life” and so we are also committed to bringing products to Australia that not only save lives and improve life quality by providing a reliable power supply, but which are also designed and produced in an environmentally sustainable way. Our factory in Sweden is unique in that it currently produces its own renewable energy through a combination of wind, water and solar energy and our ambition is to be able to do the same thing in Australia in the long term”.
