The E3X® Story: From Concept to Innovation

By Cody Davis, Director of Applications Engineering, Power Grid, Prysmian North America

In April of this year, I got the chance to witness something remarkable. I live in and grew up in Portland, OR. I feel a deep connection to my hometown and the people who live here. And now, my local utility, Portland General Electric, is installing E3X®, a product I conceptualized and developed almost 15 years ago (with a lot of help along the way from brilliant minds across Prysmian). 

15 years ago, it started as a simple question: why not? I was tasked with running calculation after calculation to determine the current-carrying capacity (ampacity) of the overhead conductor. Many, many variables and assumptions go into making this determination. Some of those assumptions include properties of the conductor, such as its emissivity and absorptivity. But why did these have to be assumptions? Why couldn’t we engineer them – and optimize them? 

I was a recent college graduate. I had only been at General Cable (now Prysmian) for two years. I didn’t fully understand the complexities of inventing a new material and a new manufacturing process. That naivety worked in my favor. I made the proposal to coat the overhead conductor with a high-emissivity, low-absorptivity coating, and was given a simple answer: make it happen. 

I was assigned a small group to investigate the possibility. The first person I needed was an expert in materials science, and that is when I met Sathish Kumar. Today, I still joke that if I were the father, Sathish would be my mother. Together, we worked to find a material to give it a shot. We coated some conductor and ran it through a test I designed at MTC. When we got the results back, we were all astonished. Not only did it work, but it also worked better than any of us expected. Just by coating the conductor, we could increase its ampacity by 20% with nothing else changing. 

Now we had to execute. We brought in others from across the organization who knew manufacturing and testing, like Ryan Andersen (now retired from Williamsport). Together, we invented not only the first high-emissivity, low-absorptivity coated overhead conductor but also the first manufacturing line for coating overhead conductors. 

We tried a lot of things; many that didn’t work. Those first manufacturing trials involved literally watching paint dry. But we crept ever closer to a final product, and in 2015, we commercialized what is now called E3X. I introduced it to the world at the IEEE PES General Meeting in July of that year. 

Sales started to slow, as is normal for electric utilities. We brought in Joe Coffey to lead sales, and with his guidance, sales took off. We are now supplying E3X by the thousands of feet throughout the United States. 

I have come a long way from being that bright-eyed, naïve recent college graduate. My title has gone from Associate Engineer to Director of Engineering. I now Chair the IEEE standard for overhead conductor ampacity (IEEE 738) and the IEEE Overhead Lines subcommittee. I have been around the world, from Argentina to China to Spain, to support overhead conductors. With all my travels, I always get asked where my favorite place is. And I always give the same answer – no matter where I have gone, I have always been happy to come home to Portland. Now, with E3X, I am proud of the difference I have made for the city and its people.