A range of cable saddles designed specifically to secure extra high voltage (EHV) cables has seen cable cleat manufacturer, Ellis, win an order to supply a Hydro Accumulative power plant in Russia’s Moscow region.
Ellis’ Centaur cable saddles were specified by Russian cable engineering and cable supply company, Systec LLC for use in the second phase development of the Zagorskaya Pumped Storage Plant (PSP), which is located in the administrative district’s Sergiev Posad area.
The plant uses two lakes at different altitudes to generate sufficient power to cope with peak demands in Moscow, and when complete will deliver 1,200MW of generated power and 1,320MW of consumable power.
Explaining the reason for specifying Ellis’ Centaur cable saddles, Pavel Udovitsky, a senior project manager for Systec, said, “We knew that Ellis had developed a cable cleat for EHV cables and when we spoke to them about the benefits it would bring to this project, the answers they provided left us in absolutely no doubt that its Centaur cable saddle was the ideal specification option.”
Centaur is a heavy duty extruded aluminium saddle cleat that was designed and developed in-house by Ellis in response to a serious safety issue surrounding the restraint of high voltage (HV) and EHV cables up to 160mm in diameter.
“When we launched Centaur in 2008 neither the British nor European Standards took into account cleats on cables of this size,” explained Ellis’ export sales director, Tony Conroy. “This meant those specifying such projects were very much in the hands of the manufacturers, who in most cases simply provided warranties for their products.
“The problem with this was that none of the products available had been short circuit tested, and so the warranties were based purely on calculations and mechanical tests. As such there was no proof the saddle cleats being used would withstand the most testing elements of the job they’d been bought for.”
Prior to launch, Ellis put its Centaur cable saddles through the rigorous testing procedures. The company shipped the Centaur cable saddles to the Netherlands where they were tested on EHV cable to 163kA peak and 63kA RMS for one second, in both 3-phase and phase to phase fault scenarios.
