Visiting EPRI Innovators
Steve Mitnick is President of Lines Up, Inc., Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly, author of “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.
Lori Burkhart is managing editor of Public Utilities Fortnightly.
You might feel like you were with PUF editors during a special tour of one of the world’s top energy labs, at EPRI’s sprawling campus in Charlotte.
PUF: Tell us about this lab.
Alex Bridges: Here in the mechanical test lab, we’re mostly focused on high temperature testing. Everything in here is running hot. We’ve got furnaces on most of the machines you see.
There are a couple of things that we don’t have any furnaces on, but we have them on the majority of the machines in here. We have about twenty machines roughly, and we have another ten that we’re getting this year. We’ve really built out over the last few years. We’re expanding back behind this wall. We should have about sixty to seventy different frames in the next three to four years.