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Pennsylvania Breaker sees growing demand from wind generation industry
Jeff Meyer, general manager of Pennsylvania Breaker, said last week the company, which employs 20 people in the design and assembly of circuit breakers, is preparing to do the final tests later this month on a new, 145,000-volt circuit breaker to meet growing demand from the wind generation industry.
The company recently received a $10,000 business micro-grant last month from the Fayette-Washington Keystone Innovation Zone to put toward the $2 million project, which was created in space Pennsylvania Breaker shares with its sister company, Pennsylvania Transformer Technologies Inc. in Canonsburg.
PTT makes medium and large transformers for the power industry. The circuit breakers produced by Pennsylvania Breaker complement the transformer business.
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Meyer said that the wind generation farms, which are usually in rural areas, generate very high current that is converted by a transformer into electricity that can be used on the country's electrical grid. The transformer and breakers are packaged in a substation near the wind generators.
"You have to generate at the right cycle and synchronize it with the power on the grid," Meyer said.
When the KIZ grant was announced, Ravi Rahangdale, President of PTT said the new breaker is a truly new product in the power industry.
"This breaker includes features that we developed that do not appear on the breakers of other manufacturers," Rahangdale said. "This puts us in an excellent position to attract more sales and expand our work force."
Meyer said that when the final round of tests are completed in Europe at the end of the month, the breaker will enter production. He said the new breaker should triple the size of Pennsylvania Breaker's work force within a year.
"By this time next year, we'll be up to about 60 people," he said, noting that physical expansion of the workplace is already being planned.
Meyer said one of his company's biggest customers is Iberdrola, the world's largest producer of wind power, which is based in Spain but has many projects in the U.S. where it uses many American-made components.
As for Pennsylvania Breaker, Meyer said many of its components are sourced within a 200-mile radius, including some parts that are made at machine shops in Washington County, although some parts come from overseas. However, the breakers are all designed in-house and assembled in Canonsburg. He noted that Pennsylvania Breaker is the only American-owned designer and assembler of high-voltage circuit breakers.
The company continues to make its first product, a 240-kV breaker, which finds service at coal-fired power plants. After the 145-kV model is launched, Meyer said the company plans to launch a new class of 245-kV breaker and a 72-kV breaker to be tested and developed before the end of the year.
In addition to ramping up for business from the wind generation industry, Meyer said the upgrade of the nation's electrical grid to a "smart grid" should bode well for the company.
"Many circuit breakers around the country are very old," he said. "They have about a 20-year life span, but the average age is 40 years and I've seen some that are as old as 70.
"The (advent of) smart grid probably means they buy more of our products," he said.
