Real World IV – NE Utilities – finally a ray of sunshine

In my last post of 2011, Wondering in Western Washington, questioned the merit of the claims made by UTILX^® in a document titled, “Life Extension Estimate for UtilX^® CableCURE^® Rejuvenation Fluid.”  That document includes 17 pages and numerous claims. In this fourth in a series of five posts, I consider two paragraphs on page 15 devoted to some “real, real world” data provided publically by Northeast Utilities, Connecticut Light & Power subsidiary.  The author devoted the previous 14 pages to the “Duke Deception” and the “Dominion Dodge,” each a poster child for the Wikipedia entry for “Non-representative Sample.” We saw that those two examples were displaced from the “real, real world” by 20X to 240X! So here is what the author said with his characteristic flair about his third and final example:

Part Three:  Connecticut Light and Power Co. Published Success:

Part One of this paper demonstrated that the fluid content contained in a cables' insulation even many years post injection is very high. Part Two of this paper demonstrated the long term effectiveness of that fluid on real cables that underwent real world ageing. Part Three of this paper shows a published real world accounting of the effectiveness of treatment on a real world population of cables. This accounting was performed by Connecticut Light and Power Co (CL&P). It was presented in the spring 2008 ICC and published in those notes. The spreadsheet describing their injection program success has been included as Appendix C of this report. That spreadsheet makes the following points.

CL&P has been carefully maintaining the failure records of the cable they consider to be 'at risk' since 1995. They began their injection program in 1999 selecting cable from that same pool of 'at risk' cables. Although the appendix includes a detailed breakout by year, the summary is succinct. From 1999 to 2007 the pool of at risk un-injected cable totaled 7.8 million feet upon which they experienced 2512 failures. From that same pool of at risk cables, 2.1 million feet had been pulled for injection. Across that same time period there are only 43 failures experienced on the 2.1 million feet. The un-injected pool is suffering a failure rate per foot of cable that is larger than 15 times greater than the cables that have been injected.

The first two sentences are of course untrue. Part One and Part Two demonstrate that under conditions unrepresentative of typical cables and in the least demanding of applications, PMDMS (phenylmethyldimethoxysilane) fluid works quite well. What this frog struggles to fathom is why the author didn’t just stick to CL&P data. The CL&P data show the profoundly positive impact that PMDMS fluid has on, dare I say it, real world reliability. The post injection failure rate is 0.7% and it is does represent an over 15-fold improvement over the untreated cable population. In the interest of transparency, I have attached the CL&P data to the bottom of this post.

Conspicuous by its Absence

What’s missing from the “Life Extension Estimate for UtilX^® CableCURE^® Rejuvenation Fluid” document is any analysis that shows the “real world” concentration of treatment fluid in the CL&P cables. This would be the proper way to draw together the Duke, Dominion, and CL&P data. At Novinium, we don’t have to make measurements to know what the concentration profile looks like. We have two U.S. Patents (7,643,977 and 7,848,912), which allows us to calculate the profile with uncanny precision. If the author were to make a measurement, it would not support his narrative. The author would find that the concentration of fluid found in the Duke transmission cable and the unloaded 35kV Dominion feeder cable are substantially greater than that found in a similarly aged 7-strand or 19-strand CL&P URD cable. I should think the author would want to revise his thinking.

In any case, there is good news. For non-demanding applications in cool mesic soils such as those in Connecticut, even the first generation of fluids performs admirably. Novinium offers the same PMDMS-based treatment fluid with several safety and performance improvements. We call our PMDMS-based material, Perficio™ 011 fluid. Numerous improvements in the next generation of technology made by the Novinium Masters of Reliability™ provide up to twice the life and twice the post injection reliability with the Ultrinium™ 73X fluid family. What do the “real world” folks in Connecticut use today for their rejuvenation program? To find out you will have to ask them, but I can say that I have added granite to my habitat.

In my upcoming fifth and last post on this thread …

Real World V – Irrefutable Proof, …

I will provide a final peer review and editorial of UTILX’s “Confidential and Proprietary” document.

Until then,

T. B. Frog

80-20120127_Real_World_IV-NE_CLP_Cable_Injection_Program.pdf (8.14 kb)