The setting
Gas-fired power station. The cooling tower and water treatment areas are a tough neighbourhood for cable management — constant high humidity, water treatment chemicals drifting in the air, and a lot of critical instrumentation and control cabling running through these zones. Cable tray failure here doesn't just mean replacing some steelwork; it risks unplanned outages on generating units.
What was going wrong
The galvanised steel cable trays in the cooling tower zone were corroding through at the joints and support bracket connections. Cable support failures were appearing in the maintenance log with increasing frequency — not yet causing trips, but the trend line was pointing in one direction. Replacing like-for-like with new galvanised steel would just restart the same corrosion clock. The plant electrical team wanted a cable management system that could handle the humidity and chemical mist without degrading.
What we installed
We replaced the affected cable tray runs with non-metallic FRP cable trays — no corrosion path, no galvanic couple, no coating to fail. The support brackets were fabricated from FRP angle sections, matching the tray material so the whole assembly stays chemically stable. The installation was handled by the plant's own electrical crew during a routine outage window — the FRP trays were light enough to carry by hand through the congested cable basement.
What changed
Bottom line: Seven years since the swap, and not a single FRP cable tray has been replaced due to corrosion. The maintenance log entries for cable support issues in this zone have dropped to zero. The plant electrical team has since extended FRP into the water treatment building as part of scheduled tray refurbishments.
Zero corrosion-related cable tray replacements in 7 years. Cable support failure incidents in the cooling tower zone eliminated.
How it compares
Galvanised steel cable trays in humid, chemically active atmospheres typically show joint corrosion within three to five years, accelerating toward replacement. The FRP alternative costs more per linear metre at procurement, but after seven years of zero intervention, the total cost of ownership has swung decisively in its favour — and the avoided risk of a cable support failure causing a unit trip is difficult to price but easy to appreciate.
Cable management is infrastructure you shouldn't have to think about during a night shift. See our cable management systems overview for design principles. More power industry applications are under FRP cable trays in power generation.