How swapping out wooden utility poles could help shore up the electric grid

Recent extreme weather, like the hurricanes that devastated large parts of the US Southeast this fall, has underscored the fragility of infrastructure in the face of increasingly severe storms.

Hurricane Milton, for example, left millions of customers in Florida without power. The storm’s force was unique, but widespread outages following extreme weather are all too common.

As the climate crisis ensures these scenarios will continue to play out, and as electricity demand grows in response to new data centers and the electrification of sectors like transportation, there’s growing attention on the need to make the electric grid more reliable.

RS Technologies is one of the companies trying to make this happen. The Ontario-based company—whose name stands for “Resilient Structures”—aims to do so by supplying composite materials-based utility poles that it claims last longer, require less maintenance, are more resistant to corrosion, and are better at withstanding extreme weather than conventional wooden utility poles.

“We’ve never had a weather-caused pole failure—ever,” CEO John Higgins told Tech Brew. “That doesn’t mean that big trees don’t fall on our poles and poles break. But as it relates to wind, ice, and so on, our poles don’t fail.”

Composite materials: RS started in 1995 and made its first utility poles in 2003. In 2020, it expanded into the US, where it has locations in Utah and Texas. The company’s products are used by roughly 500 utilities and sold in dozens of countries, according to RS.

RS’s technology involves two primary materials: fiberglass and a proprietary polyurethane resin. The company employs a manufacturing process called filament winding.

“We make them by winding the fibers back and forth on a mandrel. And we wind them both circumferentially, which means around the circumference of the mandrel, and then axially, which means back and forth on the mandrel,” Higgins said. “The result is you get fibers that criss-cross. And that makes for a really strong pole.”

Critical points: The majority of utility poles in North America are made of wood, and Higgins said he doesn’t expect that to change. But he contends that RS’s tech can make a big difference in specific use cases.

“Utilities use our composite poles as a way of augmenting critical points within their networks,” he said. “There are certain poles that are more prone to failure. And if they do fail, they are really, really hard to restore, or have a particularly profound impact on how fast the system comes back up or how much it costs to bring the system back up.”

It makes sense to use composite poles to support particularly important infrastructure, like power distribution systems that support hospitals, as well as in locations that are difficult to access or where it would be expensive to install a conventional pole, he said. Composite poles are also well-suited to environments where wood is vulnerable to degradation.

“It’s never going to be every pole,” Higgins said. But, he argued, swapping out something like 20% of the hundreds of millions of utility poles in North America could make a big difference.

Growing demand: RS is seeing an increase in demand for its products amid more extreme weather, the clean energy transition, and the construction of energy-hungry data centers to support artificial intelligence.

“Old infrastructure coupled with the weather events, wildfires, and then the demand for electricity, just sets up an overwhelming need in the coming years for a resilient and reliable grid,” Rob Krotee, RS’s EVP, told Tech Brew.

In May 2023, RS announced it would build a new manufacturing plant in Houston to help meet growing demand, including from CenterPoint Energy, a Texas-based electric and natural gas utility with millions of customers across six states. CenterPoint is using RS products “to enhance its resiliency for extreme weather events as part of its grid hardening program,” per a news release.

“RS’s infrastructure products are an important component of our efforts to provide CenterPoint Energy customers with a cost-effective, resilient grid,” Lynnae Wilson, SVP of CenterPoint’s electric business, said in a statement.

Last July, RS announced new credit agreements, totaling $148.5 million, to support further expansion.

The upfront installation costs for composite poles are higher than wooden poles, depending on the scenario, Higgins acknowledged, but he pointed to lifetime cost savings utilities can reap.

And there are other alternatives to wooden poles—materials like concrete and steel, for example, or the practice of putting power lines underground to protect them from wind, tree, and ice damage.

Undergrounding, Higgins said, is the “gold standard.” But he said it’s significantly more expensive than RS’s solution.

“Somebody’s gotta pay for that. Ultimately, that means you as a rate payer,” he said. “The nice thing about our poles is that you can get a majority of the resiliency benefits from undergrounding at a fraction of the cost.”