The usual wooden poles for electricity or the Internet would soon be made of graphene

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the usual wooden poles for electricity or the internet would
the usual wooden poles for electricity or the internet would

fiber wood post

The wooden poles are very common in Spain, and are often used for electricity or for telecommunications. They are necessary in areas that have been inhabited since even before electricity was discovered, as well as allowing electricity and networks to be deployed at a lower cost. In return, they spoil the landscape and can break down if the weather conditions are unfavorable. Therefore, a Spanish company seeks to replace them with graphene.

The company has been created by the president of the CD Castellón, Vicente Montesinos, who is going to open one of the first plants in Spain that will manufacture poles for electricity and communications based on the graphene. The company, called Graphenglass, will set up its first plant at the end of summer with a capacity to manufacture 15,000 poles, which will be easily scalable as the demand for these poles increases.

Graphene poles – best around

The use of graphene instead of wood offers a multitude of advantages. Among them are a less weight of the posts, facilitating their transport and installation. In turn, we also have a greater strength and durability than wood poles, increasing service life and reducing the need to replace them.

Wood poles also do not usually get along well with large fiber optic deployments, as these cables are thicker than the previous ones the poles were designed for, so some cannot support the weight. For this reason, sometimes they have to be reinforced with concrete or directly replaced.

The Graphenglass proposal is part of the initiative Graphene Flagship of the European Union, one of the three major lines of research launched by the EU for high-impact cutting-edge technologies in a period of 10 years and with an investment of 1,000 million euros.

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Many wooden poles can be carcinogenic

The Graphene Flasgship seeks to bring graphene and two-dimensional materials from laboratories to European society, with practical applications that go beyond theoretical or experimental uses.

The replacement of these poles is also important not only from a breakdown or deterioration point of view, but from an environmental and public health point of view. And is that some of these panels have a highly polluting material called creosote, which is obtained from a pitch distillation process. Between the toxic substances that form it is the benzopyrene, which has been shown to be carcinogenic in high concentrations.

Endesa is going to invest 1,000 million euros to replace 120,000 wooden posts that use this substance, which offered the advantage of protecting wood exposed to the outside. An example of typical use is on railway sleepers. Instead, the new posts will feature a fiberglass reinforced polyester. The substitutions will be made in Andalusia, Catalonia, Aragon, Extremadura, Castilla y León, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands.