Helman has covered the energy sector at Forbes for 20 years, profiling countless entrepreneurs and billionaires such as Aubrey McClendon, Harold Hamm and Ross Perot.
rom its factory a mile from the Pacific in Huntington Beach, California, TS Conductor makes 1,000 miles a year of new-fangled, revolutionary high voltage power line. That might sound like a lot, but CEO Jason Huang has a vision of far vaster growth.
He sees near unlimited demand for his revolutionary product — on the order of millions of miles per year from the burgeoning electrification of India, Africa and South America. Today Huang announced $60 million in new private equity investment into TS that will help begin the expansion, to 50,000 miles a year by opening a new factory “east of the Mississippi.” “The most critical component in the power grid is the conductor, the pipe the electrons move through,” says Huang, “but we are handicapped by century-old tech.” Most lines in the United States consist of a bundle of steel strands surrounded by aluminum strands, encased in rubber. Steel lines expand and sag in hot summers, and if water gets through the insulation they rust. The TS product features a carbon composite core clad in a seamless layer of annealed aluminum. It’s a simple design, impevious to rust, which won’t sag in summer and can better withstand windstorms. So what if they cost three times as much? They can carry three times as much electricity, enabling utility companies to satisfy growing electricity demand without having to build new transmission towers or fight NIMBYs to cite new long-haul lines New investor Quanta Services, one of the nation’s biggest transmission infrastructure installers, likes the product because it’s easy for workers to install without any new tooling or training. Last year TS won innovation awards from BNEF, Platts and Edison Electric. Power giants have already started deploying the lines, including Tennessee Valley Authority, Berkshire Hathway owned MidAmerican, Arizona Public Service, and new investor NextEra Energy, which operates Florida Power & Light. Other investors include Bill Gates.aturally, there’s an entrepreneurial tale behind TS. Jason Huang came to the U.S. from China in 1987 for graduate school in materials science at UCLA, after which he earned a PhD from Ohio State and an MBA from Fisher College of Business. A naturalized U.S. citizen since 1999, Huang spent the early part of his career working for the likes of Goodrich, Cytec Engineered Materials and BAE Systems. He engineered carbon composite parts for F35, F22, F18 and V22 fighter jets. In 2010 he went to work for CTC Global Corp, a leading maker of advanced transmission lines which was marketing its own better conductor, featuring a core of fiberglass and carbon fiber. This was attractive because the line wouldn’t rust or sag, while moving more electrons.However, the fiberglass proved fragile and a challenge to install. “The product was difficult to work with,” says Huang, who nonetheless spearheaded CTC’s entree into China, where he sold their line to the Chinese national power grid. But he didn’t want to stay at CTC, which had been acquired by Russian investors. “I got tired of working for the Russians,” Huang recalls. Besides, Jason Huang knew there had to be a better electric transmission solution. He hit up the expertise of a materials scientist relative named James Huang, who had focused his career on improving rebar using composite materials. James invented and patented the new line, with its composite core and aluminum encapsulation. It was considerably stiffer, less flexible and harder to coil than conventional lines, but Jason knew from his years at CTC that buyers would be interested. “I didn’t invent it,” says Jason, but he did capitalize on the opportunity. Leveraging his old connections he convinced China’s state power grid operator to deploy the new tech, where he says it passed a big test: getting installed by the “least skilled, mistake prone” field crews. “If your technology can be installed by apprentice linemen, you’re on to something,” says Huang. In 2017 Jason and James Huang and Jason’s wife Rulong cofounded TS Conductor, which owns the rights to distribute their new line everywhere in the world outside of China. In 2021 they raised an initial $25 million venture capital, to finance the build out of their Huntington Beach factory, which opened in early 2023. The new $60 million investment will support a $180 million manufacturing build out at a site to be named soon. Huang says he intends to hire 600 people in the next couple of years. Rulong owns a majority of the company.uang like to say, “we are blessed” by what appears to be very good fortune, with what he hopes to be broad patent protection on lines of annealed aluminum with carbon composite core and no fiberglass. “There is no rivalry or alternative,” he says. What stands in the way? We can expect slow adoption from conservative monopoly regulated electric utilities who are loathe to replace still-functional old lines before they absolutely have to. Early adopters include anyone trying to debottleneck renewable energy production, especially where NIMBYs have stalled new transmission projects. Huang expects a backlog of orders, and is already envisioning plants in Brazil and India. The founders set up TS as a public benefit corp, or B Corp, which instead of maximizing shareholder value like a C Corp, is instead tasked with balancing profits with public good, in this case speeding the electrification of low-carbon energy. “We can make a difference,” says Huang, nevertheless predicting an IPO in maybe 3 years. Is this a billion dollar fortune in the making? “Right now we’re just thinking about what we can do for the world,” he says.
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