Which cable do we replace first?
TodayBy age, and by best guess.
MonitoredUsing condition data from continuous monitoring, so spend goes where the risk is and every deferral has an auditable reason behind it.
Most medium-voltage cable is not monitored in real time
It sits between the substation and the street, and it carries almost everything. Here is what that costs, and what continuous monitoring changes.
Above ground
One circuit serves a whole neighbourhood
A medium-voltage circuit is the last shared link before power splits towards individual streets and buildings. One circuit does not serve one customer — it serves a neighbourhood.
Homes
Lights, heating, hot water, the freezer, the router the rest of it depends on.
Hospitals and care
Theatres, imaging, refrigerated medicine. Backup generators exist, and nobody wants to find out whether they start.
Businesses and industry
A continuous process does not pause politely. At an industrial site an unplanned outage stops production lines directly.
Transport
Signalling, depots, traction supply. A network interruption becomes a timetable interruption.
These are the four sectors Nexus Grid works in: distribution and municipal networks, industrial sites, and rail.
Below ground
Buried a metre down, and unread for forty years
The cable that carries all of it is buried, jointed, backfilled and then left alone. It has no display. It reports nothing. For most of its service life the only information anyone has about it is the date it went in.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. Every other part of a modern network is instrumented — generation, transmission, the substation. The medium-voltage layer, which is where the customer actually gets interrupted, is run on assumptions.
What is actually inside an MV cable
A medium-voltage cable is a few simple layers doing a hard job. Understanding them is enough to understand both challenges on this page.
XLPE insulation is rated for a continuous conductor temperature of 90 °C. How close a circuit runs to that limit is the whole of the second challenge on this page.
Age is a proxy for condition, and a poor one: two circuits commissioned the same year, in the same soil, can be a decade apart in remaining useful life.
Challenge one
A fault starts as a defect in the insulation
It discharges electrically for weeks before it takes the circuit out. Monitoring can detect that signal — if anything is listening for it.
- 01
A defect forms
A void in the insulation, moisture at a joint, mechanical damage from an earlier excavation. Nothing visible from the surface.
- 02
It starts to discharge
Partial discharge: tiny electrical breakdowns across the defect, thousands of times a second. This is the earliest detectable sign of insulation breakdown.
- 03
It escalates
The discharging degrades the insulation around it, which increases the discharging. The trend accelerates.
- 04
The circuit fails
Now it is an outage, an emergency excavation and a repair under time pressure — usually with the fault located to a street rather than a span.
What that costs, in the customers' own numbers
These are published results from operators who documented the difference, not projections.
over 400,000customer minutes
avoided in a single 22-month Alliander trial, from nine prevented partial-discharge outages on 240 km of cable.
Alliander200+failures prevented
in Alliander's network since 2017, as the deployment grew.
Alliander25%fewer power failures
across the monitored networks of two Dutch distribution operators.
Liander and EnexisA customer minute lost is one customer, off supply, for one minute. Four hundred thousand of them is a number that started as somebody's evening.
Listening to the cable while it runs
Continuous monitoring of a live circuit turns that sequence from a surprise into a schedule. Nothing is switched off to do it.
A trend on the circuit, not an alarm
With continuous monitoring, a developing defect registers as a trend weeks before it registers as an outage.
A span, not a street
Travelling-wave localisation places a fault to a span rather than a street, so crews dig once, in the right place.
Condition, not calendar
Real asset health data replaces time-based maintenance schedules — work goes where the risk actually sits.
On a live network
Circuits are monitored continuously while they remain in normal service. No outage is required to find out how the cable is doing.
within 1%
of monitored cable length, and often far closer — the fault-location accuracy recorded across the Alliander trial.
Alliander2.14 minutes
off Alliander's average interruption duration (SAIDI) in 2022, by locating weak spots and cable failures in — and even outside — the monitored circuits.
AllianderChallenge two
The queue is years long. The capacity is already there.
There is power to sell and no capacity to connect it, and building new network takes far longer than the connection requests will wait.
Queues, not shortages
Power to sell, customers who want it, and no way to carry it.
Years, not months
Long enough to move an investment to another country.
Curtailed and waiting
Output turned down on one side of a constraint while customers wait on the other.
The bill arrives anyway
Congestion costs money whether or not anything gets built.
Why a cable is usually carrying less than it could
A cable's rating is set for a worst case: the hottest soil, the driest conditions, full load. That worst case occurs a handful of hours a year. The rating applies for all of them.
Real-time thermal rating returns the capacity genuinely available for the other thousands of hours — computed from what the cable and its surroundings are actually doing, with alarming to keep the circuit inside its envelope.
- Real-time available capacity
- Headroom, revealed by monitoring
- Static worst-case rating
18%additional usable capacity
against the static ratings, on the highest-utilisation medium-voltage feeders at an industrial site — new load added without laying new cable.
BASFThree decisions stop being guesses
The same continuous view of the network answers three questions that are currently answered by assumption.
Grid Renewal
Where do we send the crew?
TodayTo a street, after the outage.
MonitoredTo a span, weeks before it — or straight to the fault when one happens, located to within 1% of monitored length.
Can we connect this customer?
TodayAgainst a worst-case rating that holds for a few hours a year.
MonitoredAgainst the capacity the circuit actually has, using capacity calculated from live operating data rather than a conservative margin.
Fewer interruptions, and more capacity from the same cable
The two challenges have one answer. Continuous monitoring helps prevent unseen interruptions and reveals capacity that was previously hidden.
Every figure on this page is a customer's own published result. The full studies name the operator, the network and the method.
Next step
Bring us a network
Most engagements begin with a pilot on circuits drawn from your own risk register or connection backlog.