CHARLOTTE — Across the country demand for electricity is on the rise, and the Carolinas are no different. With our growing population, new industries and a rise in advanced manufacturing, our energy grid needs more power and the transmission to get it from where it’s produced to where we can use it.
The problem is, there’s a bottleneck when it comes to one crucial piece of grid infrastructure, something called bushings. A new manufacturer in Charlotte is hoping to help.
German-based HSP started operations in Charlotte this summer. Nils von Dietman, the CEO of HSP US, said Charlotte was the ideal location for the company’s first U.S. factory because of its proximity to many of its customers, a good business environment and a strong local workforce.
“It helps to be here, to be local,” he said. “It’s very easy for us to go visit our customers.”
Their first few orders of bushings are already moving through the facility, which hopes to make and test 200 bushings by the end of the year, getting the infrastructure out quickly to a very eager U.S. market.
A recent report from the Department of Energy found some companies are facing lead times of two and a half years or longer to get these crucial components and most of them are manufactured overseas.
“The U.S. is currently the largest market, the fastest growing market,” von Dietman said.
So, what exactly are bushings?
If you’ve ever seen the big electrical equipment at a substation, they’re the things that look like giant lanterns or upside-down screws connecting the electrical equipment to the overhead wires.
Essentially, power plants or solar fields make the electricity we use, but in order to get it, it needs to be transformed up to high voltages in a piece of equipment aptly named a transformer. The bushing is an insulated connector that allows the high voltage power to travel safely between the wires and the transformers.
“Wherever you generate electricity, wherever you store electricity, wherever you consume electricity you need to transform, using a transformer,” von Dietman said. “Whenever you need transformers, you need bushings.”
Von Dietman said the HSP facility in Charlotte is designed to build and test some of the highest voltage classes of bushings on the market and is the first facility to do so in the United States.
Construction is still underway to expand the facility’s capacity, but von Dietman said he wanted operations to begin as early as possible to address the high demand. By the end of next year, he expects the Charlotte location to produce 3,500 bushings and grow steadily from there.
HSP plans to create 140 on-site jobs in Charlotte. As the facility gets up and running, the company is also partnering with the city and Central Piedmont Community College to create a training pipeline for the local workforce.
“We want our residents to be able to train here, work here, and build a career here,” Charlotte city council member Dimple Ajmera said. “We know that our city is growing. We know that advanced manufacturing is growing right here in our city and with that the demand for electricity grows.”