LEBANON – A company spun out of Dartmouth College claims it has developed a product that can instantaneously melt ice off power lines.

Often, however, as with the historic ice storm in New Hampshire last month, the problem is ice on the trees, not ice on the lines.

"There's obviously a problem with ice forming on lines that causes the lines to become more heavy," Gabriel Martinez, vice president of Lebanon-based Ice Engineering LLC, said. But, he added, "Most of the failure of the lines is due to trees falling down, and there's obviously not much we can do about that."

Still, in areas where trees are trimmed back and icy power lines do cause outages, the company's "Icenabled" applications could make a difference, Martinez said.

The "Icecontroller" product enables a power company to alter the resistance in specific sections of a power line, effectively constricting the flow of electricity and causing more pressure in the form of heat that melts the ice. Installing the electronics to control the resistance on the lines would cost an electric company no more than 10 percent of its cost to install the lines, and the product elongates the lifespan of the cables, Martinez said.

"When you consider the value of a solution to this problem, you have to consider the cost of solving it, and also the money that the power company is not making because it's not providing service to its customers," he said.

Matt Chagnon, a spokesman for Public Service of New Hampshire, the state's largest electric company, said he's never heard of Ice Engineering or its power line de-icing product.

"The majority of problems (during last month's ice storm) were from downed trees," he said, not icy wires.

So far, Ice Engineering has had better luck generating interest in its power line products abroad, Martinez said.

"We've found it very difficult to work with the utility companies in the U.S., mainly because they were unable to provide development funds," he said, adding that the company has recently raised more capital and is looking to spin off at least four companies to manufacture and sell its products.

Another obstacle for Ice Engineering in the U.S. is the deregulation of the power grid. Martinez said that has caused fragmentation and confusion over who actually owns the poles on which the power lines are strung. Part of the company's strategy now is "figuring out who really is the best target customer," he said.

Victor Petrenko, a professor at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering who just happens to share a name with the famous ice skater, founded Ice Engineering in 2001. The company has since developed a multitude of de-icing technologies, including a product that quickly melts ice off car windshields, products that melt ice from bridges and roads, an industrial-size, high-efficiency icemaker, and a product that melts ice off military ships without radar detection by the enemy.