Critical gas for sustainable high-voltage grids now made in Germany

What it means for hiring

Hitachi Energy has signed a long-term supply deal with Daikin for C4-FN, the specialty gas in the insulating mixtures of its SF6-free EconiQ high-voltage equipment. Daikin will make it in Frankfurt from 2027, adding a European source to the Asian suppliers Hitachi Energy already uses. EconiQ has more than 4,000 orders across forty countries. SF6, the gas it replaces, has a global warming potential 24,300 times that of CO2, and Europe's revised F-gas rules are phasing it out of new switchgear.

Securing the gas is the easy part. Every SF6-free breaker and gas-insulated substation still has to be designed, type tested, installed and maintained by people trained around SF6, and the alternative mixtures behave differently in arc interruption, gas handling and leak monitoring. Switchgear makers need high-voltage development and test engineers who can qualify new insulation media, and transmission operators and their contractors need commissioning and service engineers retrained on them. That demand lands just as grid operators across Europe are hiring for the largest network build in decades. High-voltage engineers were already scarce before the gas changed. An employer that can offer real development work on a new insulation technology has an argument to put to an engineer who has spent a career maintaining the old one.

Read the original at PCIM News Platform .