The US grid is massive, aging, and often unreliable, but there are ambitious plans for upgrades — meaning the US market has probably never been more ready for Ensto products.
In 2020, the average American experienced over eight hours of power outages, while the German average, for example, was a mere 12 minutes. What is more, the US grid just cannot keep pace with the needs of the American population.
The US grid is slated to need double its current capacity by 2035 to keep up with the needs of the consumers, but it is in such bad shape that it is not yet ready to even support electric vehicle charging stations. If only half the population would get EVs, the grid would crash.
More Power
The solution is a combination of building new lines and getting more power out of the existing grids. The scale of a brand-new grid is absolutely overwhelming and hence, simply impossible to put into practice. Even the biggest investor-owned utilities do not have the manpower to meet the needs: a thousand miles per year is not manageable.
Part of the solution is a massive effort at the federal level. To expand and modernize the grid, the US Department of Energy announced 13 billion dollars of financing, which is said to be the largest single direct federal investment ever in transmission and distribution infrastructure.
The US is really vast and there are different challenges in different places: wildfires in the west, ice storms in the east, and hurricanes in the south. So far, Ensto has worked primarily in the west, but its products are capable of solving problems in other regions, too. The company can help improve the sturdiness and reliability of the grid across the entire country.
Ensto Solutions
Ensto sees real potential for Ensto's full-covered conductor solution (FCCS) in the US. The use of covered conductors is becoming more prevalent across North America. While wildfires are the relevant application in the Western half of the country, it is hurricanes in the Southeast, and icing in the Northeast. The FCCS must be applied regionally, according to the primary need for those areas.
Arcteq protection relays, and their arc flash mitigation and arc quenching technologies are already sought after: customers recognize these products and are asking for them. The current lead times for US- or Mexico-manufactured equivalent products is 30 to 40 weeks, but Ensto can deliver in two to four weeks. (Yes, two to four weeks.)
Underground cable accessories, particularly hot and cold shrink technology (called splice kits in the US) also suffer from long lead times. It seems there are non-IAAA/ANSI standard products that US customers are interested in because they don't want to wait 40 weeks. There has been a business case for IEEE arresters on the American market, made by Ensto in Europe with final assembly by Ensto in the US and today, the products are available on the US market.
Budgeted Growth
Ensto already has millions of dollars in annual sales in the US, but forecasts for 2024 call for a 43-percent and plans for 2025 an over 500 percent increase in sales. This is not a small change, and to support it Ensto has hired a team in the US to fully support its business and customers and moreover, invested in a 20,000 square-foot (2,000 square-meter) warehouse and office in McKinney, Texas, near Dallas.
Texas offers good tax incentives to businesses, and it is also centrally located, equidistant from the coasts and situated on two major highways, one to the Houston port and the other to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, the port and airport constituting a major transportation hub for North America.
Ensto’s primary focus is to be the established install base with the highest quality standard. The company is already inside the customers’ grids in the United States and when the existing customer base, the local warehouse, the superior lead times, and the in-house laboratory, testing and manufacturing facilities are put together, it should be the perfect solution for the market.