“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,” one RS Technologies exec tells Tech Brew.

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.”

Continue reading at Tech Brew

For more utility related reading, check out the potential impact of the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision, TerraPower’s new reactor construction, and the demand for AI potentially driving more generation investment.