Brazilian Manufacturer to Set Up Voltage Regulator Plant in North Carolina
A Brazilian manufacturer with utility and energy infrastructure customers in more than 50 countries is adding to the U.S. grid equipment building boom with plans for a plant in North Carolina.
Leaders of TSEA Energy recently announced they will invest $25 million in a step voltage regulator manufacturing facility in Eden, which sits north of Greensboro and near the Virginia state line. The factory, which will fill a 162,000-square-foot building vacated in 2024 by engineered materials company Loparex, will be TSEA’s first in the United States and is expected to create about 160 jobs after it starts operations late this year.
“Utilities are making significant investments to modernize their infrastructure while integrating new forms of generation and demand,” Maurício Machado, COO of TSEA's Voltage Regulator division, said in a statement. “This investment strengthens our ability to support U.S. customers more efficiently and reinforces our role in advancing a more reliable and resilient energy system.”
Officials with TSEA said the company will make voltage regulators that are rated up to 1100A nominal current and 36.2 kV nominal voltage. To date, the company only manufactures in Brazil but already serves more than 40 utilities in the United States. Setting up the Eden plant, they said, will more than double TSEA’s global manufacturing capacity.
The investment plans by TSEA adds to a long list of projects underway or recently completed that have sought to meet the growing need for electrical equipment used in the renovation and expansion of the North American electric grid. Among the companies that have put to work hundreds of millions combined are Virginia Transformer Corp., Hitachi Energy, ABB and GE Vernova.
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Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications T&D World, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner and Oil & Gas Journal. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.