Nominate Your Utility's Top Innovators
Deadline: July 15
PUF’s annual Fortnightly Top Innovators uniquely recognizes individual innovators and teams of innovators at electric, natural gas, and water utilities.
Fortnightly Magazine - July 2025
Resilience, Demand Growth, and More
Evergy
“Evergy’s strategic tenets are affordability, reliability, and sustainability. If you ever put too much emphasis on one of those tenets at the expense of the others, you’ll get out of balance and run into trouble. Out of balance inevitably creates issues with key constituents.”
Role of the States in the Energy Transition
Calif. Energy Commission
“The State Energy Offices are most easily characterized as the energy policy arm of the governor of each state. They’re diverse. Sometimes they’re stand-alone agencies or located in a Department of Commerce. We are located within the California Natural Resources Agency.”
Nineteen Voices from Burns & McDonnell's Annual Transmission Symposium
Events
From the sidelines of its Annual Transmission Symposium, conversations with Burns & McDonnell’s Alberto Ruiz, Chih-Hung Chen, Jess Kurpius, Zach O'Toole, JC Perkins, Matt Ingram, Matt Lind, Kyle Combes, Michaela Nickell, Brent Windsor, Brad Gardner, Paul Barker, Danny Serrano, Vinny Montemurro, James Duehning, Mark Van Dyne, Kent Herzog, Alex Lee, and Polsinelli law firm’s Andrew Schulte.
Developing Greenfield Transmission
Burns & McDonnell
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.”
Design Process vs. Construction
Burns & McDonnell
“The biggest takeaway is the importance of building a stronger bridge between the engineers in the office and the crews out in the field. It’s about understanding what’s happening on site — what tools are being used, what challenges they’re facing — and making sure that insight makes its way back into our design process.”
Challenges of Conductor Change
Burns & McDonnell
“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.”
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.”
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.”