What does cooking rice have to do with protecting wind turbines from dangerous lightning surges?
The answer to the question boils down to how time and an unlikely invention steered a company on its course to become a leader in lightning protection technology. Sankosha, which is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, has been in operation for 94 years, and began life with the invention of the first electric rice cooker.
Lightning Protection
Since then, the company has greatly expanded its original focus to gas discharge tubes and surge protection technologies, the latter of which is a much needed “insurance policy” to protect large structures such as turbines from catastrophic damage caused by lightning strikes.
“Our main technology is lightning protection, so all our products are lightning-protection and surge-protection oriented,” said Jerry Schroeder, general manager and director of sales and engineering for Sankosha U.S.A. “Sankosha is a company from Japan with our HQ in Tokyo. We also have a large technical center there.”
Sankosha strives to provide lightning and surge protection for all industries, including wind, according to Schroeder. This could mean sectors such as power, communication, transportation, home use — anything that might need some type of surge protection, especially tall structures exposed to the elements.
“Anything sticking up in the air has the potential to get hit by lightning,” he said. “With lightning, you don’t need a direct hit because lightning is such a powerful event that it creates a big magnetic and electrical field around it. Just being nearby can induce current and voltage in a nearby metal object just by being in that field. Even if lightning hits the ground next to the tower, you could have surges in the tower.”
‘Grounding is key’
A wind turbine is made up of a lot of delicate equipment that can be disrupted at best and destroyed at worst by a lightning strike, so protection is paramount to prevent costly damage, according to Schroeder.
“Grounding is key,” he said. “If you don’t have a good grounding system, nothing’s going to work. The surge has got to go somewhere, and you have to control it.”
A key protection offered by Sankosha is its SAN-EARTH M5C Conductive Cement, according to Schroeder. Invented and patented by Sankosha, SAN-EARTH M5C Conductive Cement is used to build conductive concrete grounding electrodes. It is environmentally friendly and designed to make excellent contact with the soil, protect copper embedded in it from corrosion for more than 25 years, and is a theft deterrent for copper thieves. When it comes to earth grounding, many people only care about the resistance of the grounding system and don’t realize that the inductance and capacitance are also super important, especially for fast and power events like lightning surges. SAN-EARTH M5C was developed with all this in mind so that it would provide the best protection.
“I know that it has helped a lot of businesses because I’ll go to a convention and I’ll be sitting in the audience and listening to people give presentations, and a lot of them will talk about problems that they’ve had in the past,” he said. “And they’ll say, ‘Oh, we had this project, and we used the San-Earth product, and we didn’t have any equipment damaged from lightning strikes since.’ That’s the greatest advertisement we get when people say, ‘We had a problem; we used SAN-EARTH M5C and it fixed it.’”
Company Expansion
Sankosha has been operating mostly in Japan and Asia for decades, and Schroeder said the company is expanding and offering its surge protection technology across the globe. The company has been doing this by acting on a simple, but seemingly obvious, philosophy: “Protecting what we take for granted every day.”
Sankosha has been able to do this by being in touch with the needs of growing technologies around the world, including wind energy, according to Schroeder.
“Whenever a new technology or a new type of communication or a new kind of system is developed, our engineers work hand-in-hand with all the customers who may need some kind of protection,” he said. “That’s how a lot of our products get started is they’re custom-made for somebody who was working on something cutting edge. So, we’re working with customers, and we have a lot of people who are working for the latest standard committees, and we’re promoting and implementing those standards. Making products that meet those standards and keeping up with them is important.”
Superior Product
A point of pride with Schroeder is the superiority of Sankosha’s conductive cement product and how the company proves that.
“We are the original creators of conductive cement,” he said. “There are others making it now who have tried to copy ours, but when we test it, we’re still the best. Others seem to not understand the science behind it. And one thing that does set us apart from others is, in Japan, we have six or seven very, very large machines that generate lightning. We are testing our products with real lightning levels. We’re actually testing it as if it got hit by lightning. None of it’s theory.”
And that certainty is especially appreciated when compared to other surge alternatives on the market, according to Schroeder.
“We may be a little high end, but if you go to Amazon and look at some of the protectors on there, they’re from these no-name companies,” he said. “We get these, and we test them; many of them fail to even meet their specs because the problem is, lightning comes in a huge range of power. Some are very weak; some are very powerful. So, when you’re hit, how do you know how strong that lightning was? We have a strong philosophy that our products work, and our customers that use our products don’t have problems. We’re by far the No. 1 company in Japan for lightning protection. Unfortunately, we don’t have the name recognition in the United States, but people who use our products come back.”
Making Inroads in the U.S.
Schroeder said that, although Sankosha is not yet well known in the U.S., he has hopes that will soon change.
“Right now, in Japan and Asia, they use different ac voltages and frequencies than here in the U.S.,” he said. “A lot of our power protection products and specs are geared toward the Asia markets. We approach a lot of potential customers and say, ‘Try using this.’ And they look at the specs and say, ‘We don’t see U.S. levels.’ We want them to give us a chance. That’s a challenge for our office in the U.S. here is that we have to get the approval of the engineers in Japan to adjust the specs, and that also involves a lot of testing.”
Schroeder said Sankosha is ready to face those challenges because he believes in the products Sankosha offers as well as the fact that Japan’s history and technological place in the world is a high bar for others to jump over.
“As I said, we protect the things that most people don’t think about every day such as picking up the phone and getting a dial tone or turning the light switch and the lights come on,” he said. “For example, Japan is very train oriented. We provide all the lightning and surge protection for all the train companies in Japan; that’s one of our specialties. We work with all the companies. You’ll see in our catalog a lot of stuff designed for trains and things like that. When lightning hits somewhere in Japan, there’s probably a train track or something nearby, so it’s a big thing for them.”
Making Japanese Efficiency Known
And Schroeder said he wants to bring more of that Japanese efficiency to the U.S. and other parts of the world in order to make sure all industries — including wind — get the surge protection technology they need.
“The U.S. has gotten a lot better recently, but in the past, we used to have a lot of the internet going down,” he said. “We’d have a storm come through, and services would go down; the cable would go down, and the power would go out. But when you visit Japan, they have typhoons and storms and stuff like that all the time, and everything works. Having stuff that actually works and protects is the most important thing, I think, to Sankosha. And our customers see that.”
More info www.sankosha-usa.com
