Designing Transmission Lines for Safety
Burns & McDonnell
“Zach and I are hitting on the ways that engineers can expand their thinking to set up craft labor for more successful and safe execution.”
Law & Lawyers
Galloping on Transmission Lines
Burns & McDonnell
“Galloping is a type of low-frequency, high-amplitude vibration in power lines. It’s when the wires start bouncing up and down, sometimes to an extreme degree. It’s a big deal because it can cause serious damage.”
FERC Order 1920
Burns & McDonnell
“Order 1920 in some ways may sound drastic in terms of the magnitude of change. But it provides an opportunity to evaluate transmission more creatively, more holistically.”
Concrete Poles for Transmission Lines
Burns & McDonnell
“On a steel or wood pole, a specialized coating or a sleeve is put on below grade to protect from corrosion. But with concrete, it comes out of the mold ready to set in a corrosive environment.”
Best Practices for Cased Transmission Foundations
Burns & McDonnell
“We’re looking at the strength of the soil to figure out how deep the foundation needs to go. Not so shallow that it fails in a few years, but not so deep that it’s over-designed and unnecessarily expensive. It’s about finding the right balance between long-term durability and cost.”
Underground Transmission Considerations
Burns & McDonnell
“I led the onshore portion of the South Fork Wind Project and will provide examples from that project of how regulatory influence can drive design decisions and environmental considerations when you’re in construction.”
PUF Chats With CEOs
Accenture
Key industry thought leaders from the C-suite gave unique perspectives on building an energy system for resilience, growth, affordability, and more at the sidelines of Accenture’s International Utilities and Energy Conference 2025.
PUF Chats: Calvin Butler
Exelon, EEI
“I see my leadership at Exelon and my leadership at EEI as perfect matches in terms of what we’re doing. Because if I lead with my customer, I lead with reliability, resiliency, security, and affordability. Those issues permeate all our organizations.”
PUF Chats: Chris O'Shea
Centrica
“If we build an energy system which nobody can afford, we’ll have failed. If we build an energy system which is clean but not reliable, we’ll have failed. If we continue using unabated fossil fuels, we’ll have failed. The answer is somewhere in the middle of these three, and we’ve got to have a properly informed debate.”
PUF Chats: Joe Purington
AVANGRID
“We’re fortunate being a global company on the supply chain side. Being part of the Iberdrola family in AVANGRID, it speeds up our wait time to 2 to 3 years. Where we had impacts from COVID in the U.S. on distribution transformers, we were able to take manufacturing slots from Brazil.”