Getting to the core of the cable revolution
We pretty much take cables for granted, only becoming aware of them when they fail.
Recently, we are seeing how the evolution of telecommunications infrastructures, and in particular, the replacement of old copper lines with fiber optics is not only ushering in a bandwidth and internet revolution, but also freeing up huge amounts of extremely valuable copper, which is estimated to be worth many billions of dollars as global demand for copper is expected to more than double between 2022 and 2035.
But beyond the cables we use to transmit our data, there are others that transmit electricity along thousands of kilometers of high-voltage power lines in every country. In this case, we are talking about very long cables that have traditionally had a steel core surrounded by aluminum fibers, a technology we have been using since the beginning of the last century. Such cables, although they have a high transmission capacity, tend to heat up, either because of the amount of energy passing through them or because of the high exterior temperatures, and can experience problems that sometimes result in fires or outages, which need to be repaired with costly emergency procedures. The logical consequence of this is that grid operators tend to be careful in calculating the amount of energy passing through their lines, which prevents these cables from reaching…
