T&D Grid

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The key takeaway is understanding the evolving approach to traditional refurbishment projects. That’s where advanced conductors like ACCC come in. These all-aluminum composite conductors offer higher capacity and performance without requiring changes to the existing line design.”

James Duehning, Mark Van Dyne, Kent Herzog, Alex Lee, and Andrew Schulte: “We need to shift from a deterministic planning model to something more probabilistic, especially with all the uncertainty around future load and generation. The way we identify project needs today doesn’t fully reflect the realities we’re facing.”

“We came across a neat wrinkle around the untapped potential of existing retired infrastructure, like a retired coal plant, which in many cases has transmission interconnection and substation infrastructure. There are about 180 or so that have adequate infrastructure for utilities to consider retrofitting.“

“Every year, 10 million miles of conductor are needed. Even with our South Carolina expansion, we’re looking at about 30,000 miles of conductor. That is a drop in the bucket. That 150 million miles of conductor needed in 15 years is for the global marketplace, but it is still a massive number.”

“Utilities are focused on making sure they can meet the growth, but we’re also seeing the impact of continued weather events, extreme climate events that require a resilient, reliable grid. We have not seen a stop of those investments from a grid-modernization, grid-reliability perspective.”

“While they’ve acknowledged the workforce lacks the technical expertise to deploy AI and machine learning, they are looking at how to fix this through more training. About 48% of those surveyed said continuous training and education can help bridge that expertise gap.”