Cable maker Nexans officially opened its high-voltage power cable plant in Goose Creek on Wednesday, about two and a half years after it picked Berkeley County for the project.
Gov. Nikki Haley joined Nexans Chief Executive Officer Arnaud Poupart-Lafarge and Steve Hall, executive vice president of Nexans North America, for the plant’s inauguration, according to the company and the governor’s office.
The 350,000-square-foot plant near Charleston will make high-voltage power cables and is expected to create 200 manufacturing jobs over the next few years, according to Nexans. The company said the plant will serve growing North American demand driven by major new power transmission projects.
“With the opening of this new plant, Nexans is best-placed to serve the major new power transmission infrastructure projects currently being planned in North America today,” Poupart-Lafarge said in the company’s announcement.
A tower on the skyline
The most visible piece of the plant is a 427-foot vertical continuous vulcanization tower, which Nexans said is now the tallest building in South Carolina. The tower is used to turn polymers into the insulation layers that protect the cable.
Nexans said it designed the lower level of the tower to serve as a shelter for employees in a hurricane. The company said it built the plant without underground storage tanks and with dry substation transformers to avoid potential soil contamination.
The plant can type-test cables up to 550 kilovolts under North American and international standards, and it is ISO 9001:2008 certified, according to Nexans.
From announcement to opening
Nexans announced the project in March 2012, when the S.C. Department of Commerce said the company would invest $85 million and create up to 200 jobs. The state’s Coordinating Council for Economic Development approved a $1.6 million rural infrastructure grant for Berkeley County to help with site work and infrastructure, and readySC would provide training for potential workers, the department said at the time.
The plant was built on a new site in the Bushy Park Industrial Complex. In its first phase, it was to focus on underground land cables from 69 kilovolts up to extra-high-voltage cables of 420 kilovolts, with a possible later extension into submarine cable, according to the 2012 announcement.
Nexans broke ground about two years ago, the company said.
“In the initial development phase, we were confident that the Charleston region was the perfect place to build a new plant,” Hall said in the announcement. “Now that the plant is open for business, we are more convinced than ever that it was the right move.”
Hall pointed to the state’s business climate, a highly skilled local labor force and technical schools and training programs.
When the project was announced in 2012, Dirk Steinbrink, vice president in charge of Nexans’ High Voltage and Submarine Business Group, called the Berkeley plant “a key strategic development” for capturing demand from major transmission projects in North America and worldwide.
What it means for Nexans
The Goose Creek plant adds high-voltage cable to the medium-voltage, low-voltage, overhead transmission, industrial, building wire, electrical wire and computer network cable that Nexans already sells in North America. North America accounted for 14% of the group’s total sales in 2013, with more than 3,000 employees, the company said.
Worldwide, Nexans has close to 26,000 employees and had 2013 sales of nearly 6.7 billion euros, according to the company. It has an industrial presence in 40 countries and is listed on the Paris stock exchange.
“It’s always a great day in South Carolina when the doors open to a plant that is bringing 200 jobs to our state,” Haley said in the Nexans announcement.
She added, “Today we welcome Nexans to their new home in Goose Creek and look forward to seeing them continue to grow and succeed for many years to come.”
