Speaker 1:

Integrity is everything. Our way of life in this country rises and falls on the integrity of our leaders and the integrity of our infrastructure. Because integrity impacts everything, this is the Integrity Podcast, powered by Exo, hosted by Zachary Oliphant.

Zachary Oliphant:

Well, welcome everybody. I’m excited to have our distinguished guest today, Mike Miller with us. Give you a little bit of background on Mike. Mike’s got so many acronyms after his name, this might take a little bit. Mike Miller’s professional engineer, and he is the vice president of technical services at Exo. He’s got 33 years of experience as a civil engineer in the electrical transmission structures industry, designing, analyzing, and testing critical infrastructure. Mike has a BS and a Ms degree in civil engineering from Portland State University, and is licensed as a professional civil engineer in over 20 US states and several Canadian provinces.

Zachary Oliphant:

Mike is also a member of IEEE, CIGRE and is a fellow of ASCE and SEI, which is just a fantastic honor. Mike just want to welcome you here to the Integrity Podcast, happy to have you and all of your knowledge and experience as part of Exo, but I’m happy to have you share some of that knowledge, impart your knowledge on the folks that are listening. Hopefully we’ll have a great conversation today. Maybe just to start off, Mike, walk me through your background. How did you get into engineering? What drove you to engineering? We’ll start there.

Mike Miller:

Sure. Well, happy to be here, Zach. For me, it probably started way back in grade school when one of my instructors, one of my teachers set me aside and helped me with math. Math is very needed in the industry for engineering type of activities. And for me I struggled at that time. This was in seventh grade, seventh, eighth grade, and he really helped me, put me on the right path and showed me the ropes. I remember, Mr. Castleman, that was his name. And then after that I learned long division, multiplication. And then I was into music. I actually took up an instrument, trumpet, started playing in the band. There’s a relationship between musical notes and engineering. It’s a mathematical relationship. And so that also I think had a big influence on me and what drove me to engineering. I kept with music for many, many years, and in fact I still play.

Zachary Oliphant:

Well, that’s amazing. Something I didn’t know about you, Mike, we’ll have to have you play at the office one day. And so walk me through your education background at Portland State. Why did you gravitate to civil engineering? Right? There’s all these different engineering fields you could have gone down where math is certainly a huge component of them. What really drove you into civil engineering in particular?

Mike Miller:

Well, I was also interested in electrical engineering, construction engineering, which is a branch of civil engineering, but I gravitated towards civil structural. I think what did it for me was I was doing problems and I was taking a statics or dynamics class, I believe. I was doing homework problems and I for the homework problem assignment, instead of just writing it up on a piece of paper and turning it in nice and neat you’re supposed to do in engineering class, I wrote a program. I wrote a basic program that at that time computers had just, PCs had just come out in the industry. And so I wrote the program to create the shear and moment diagrams and plot the shear and moment diagrams that were part of the problem.

Mike Miller:

And so my instructor at the time caught onto that and said, hey, we got to get this guy. And so I started working for him in the structures lab of Portland State University.

Zachary Oliphant:

Fantastic. And so that was the impetus of now you’re a structures guy and have been there for decades now. Once you got out of school and you got your masters, then where’d you go to work?

Mike Miller:

As a student I actually worked at Bonneville Power as a student doing work for them, doing drafting. That was the time where you’d have a room full of drafting tables and you’d see engineers, old school type engineers doing drawings. And so I started with them right out of school. I had several other offers, which I was happy for, but chose to stay in the Pacific Northwest. This was after my master’s degree. And started working on engineering and working on the electrical power structures that we see every day, lattice structures and tubular steel poles and so forth. I really gravitated toward lattice because there was so much existing lattice in the system.

Mike Miller:

And so much of my early career was just modeling those lattice structures. Several hundred structures were modeled and learned a lot by doing that. And of course learned by just being around the other engineers and learning from them.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And a lot of what we discuss here on our podcast is that joy of learning and continuing to learn and learn from others. It’s amazing how that’s interwoven into almost every conversation, right? Who did I learn from? Who am I helping learn? Which I think is a fantastic perspective. You’re working for BPA and you worked there for quite a while working in the engineering department and leading engineering department. And then you decide to go outside of the utility and go into the commercial space. Walk me through that.

Mike Miller:

At that time Bonneville was in a big build out where they were building out major 500 KV corridors, lines that were being done and I was involved heavily involved in new design for them at that time. And then it slowed down, which is natural. These things come and go ebb and flow with the different needs of the region and so forth. I still wanted to do more design. And so I decided to go ahead and leave the federal government, the protective blanket of the federal government as well, and go out into the private industry. And so I moved. In fact, I did a geographic move. I moved to Houston, Texas, and worked for SAE Towers, which had manufacturing in Mexico and manufacturing in Brazil.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And primarily manufacturing lattice towers.

Mike Miller:

That’s right. Primarily lattice, but also tubular steel poles.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. As you think, Mike, about your professional career, maybe walk me through and for the audience your current role with Exo and what you’re doing today. And maybe we can then dive into a couple of examples, seminal moments in your career that as you look back, that maybe impacted you in some positive or negative way, but had an impact on you.

Mike Miller:

Today of course I lead the data portal group, which is a group of individuals, data analysts, and engineers that take that data in from our inspections and really put it up on the GIS server, so that our customers can see and look at that. But at the same time we’re also evaluating that data and making determinations and ratings on the condition of that data of all the assets. And so I manage that group and improve the data processes where I can, but that’s one aspect. The other aspect is doing implant auditing. I’m involved in the assessments and the processes for doing that evaluation of different audit for both lattice and tubular steel pole, and then also forensic type engineering.

Mike Miller:

If there’s a failure in the field somewhere, oftentimes customers will contact us and we’ll go take a look and do some forensic engineering to determine the root cause analysis of the failure and then back out what happened and see that that doesn’t happen again.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. It’s interesting as you think about our business and in some ways what makes us unique is this combination of this field data collection or inspection component, which is critically important we get right. And then you have the second piece, which is, what do you do with all that data? Right? You and your team do a fantastic job in synthesizing that data. And then being able to deliver to a client some actionable details on where do we spend money to solve a problem, which is critically important. As you think about, Mike, in your history of being in engineering, are there some examples that come to mind where maybe we’ve solved, whether it’s at Exo or maybe in your former career where we’ve solved some interesting and unique challenges for clients and what that experience was like?

Mike Miller:

Just in the time that I’ve been here with Exo, we’ve had some excellent opportunities and some great challenges, and we’ve come up with some very unique solutions for some of these challenges. Some that come to mind is, are a tubular steel pole line that was an older line, weathering steel pole which was at least 30 years old in the Midwest. And that particular line was corroding at the ground line, which we often see with some of these structures. And so we were tasked to come in and remediate, first evaluate, determine the section loss of the poles and then remediate that and do it in a cost effective solution, of what was challenging about this project is this particular line was in a residential area and these structures were in backyards of different homeowners.

Mike Miller:

And so that created a unique challenge, to do it in a way that wasn’t too disruptive, that still met the need and reinforced the structure so that these structures could last say another 30 years. It was successful. We were able to do that. We were able to do it within the time period. We were within the budget that was allotted and a very unique solution, which was a basic wrap of a certain structural components that reinforced the tubular steel pole at the ground line, which is the highest point of load on the ground.

Zachary Oliphant:

I imagine real challenge for them would be tearing up people’s backyards and rebuilding a line, which is always an alternative that utilities consider, but doing that in someone’s backyard becomes really disruptive and pretty expensive as well I can imagine.

Mike Miller:

Absolutely. And these components, we didn’t have to bring in a crane to install them. These were all basically small enough that they could be lifted by a person installed one by one. And doing that in a systematic way we were able to avoid some of these big disruptive construction activity type of things that of course homeowners don’t really care for.

Zachary Oliphant:

Certainly in their backyard-

Mike Miller:

That’s right.

Zachary Oliphant:

… big cranes and whatnot. Well, maybe give me another example, Mike, where you think that you’ve taken this synthesis of engineering and inspection and data delivery with a client where we’ve solved another problem or where you’ve solved another problem.

Mike Miller:

Sure. As you know, so much of our infrastructure in the US is 40, 50, 60 years old, and that’s not a bad thing. These things, these structures, particularly the lattice lines that were installed in the 50s, 60s and 70s, they still have a lot of service life. Okay? But they need to be maintained. And so one project, again in the Midwest where we were asked to go and assess the condition of a particular lattice line, a double circuit line, so these are very tall structures and older within I think 60, 70 timeframe. We went ahead and did that and did a drone inspection, gathered data. And the decision that the utility was grappling with was trying to determine whether to replace the line or remediate the line. Okay?

Mike Miller:

And so when we did that work, we evaluated the photos, took all the data, ground line assessments, and we determined that it was indeed remediatable and it could be done in efficient way and not too costly. And that was very valuable of course for the utility, to have that data. We presented it in a form of course that was easy to digest with our JS based, cloud based system that we provide them. We go in and that rating system comes up and they can select which structures needed attention in terms of maintenance or replacements of certain components and which structures they didn’t need to really worry about.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. I think it’s interesting as we think about, I know Wes who’s on our team sits on the committee to write the condition of various components of USs infrastructure. A lot of that infrastructure is D+, C minus and has some real age to it. I think the interesting thing we see in our industry as a lot of the, I’ll call it the non-wood infrastructure is getting to an age now where it needs something done. And we’re seeing, as you mentioned, utilities really grapple with this concept. It’s old, I should replace it, as one way of thinking. Or no, it’s still perfectly good or mostly good and I can make these little tweaks and improvements and the line is actually will last much longer.

Zachary Oliphant:

Walk me through your view if you’re sitting in the shoes of a utility operator, what you believe you would need to be able to make an educated decision regarding those two options and maybe some of the struggles and some of the things you could find in a company like Exo to help give you the information to make an intelligent decision.

Mike Miller:

Sure. As I mentioned before, the age of the infrastructure in general is 40, 50, 60 years old, and yet steel doesn’t degrade over time. It can corrode if it’s not maintained. I believe there’s a certain push or title push to the industry or replacement mentality, so that it’s like the throwaway mentality, but applied to structures, so that after a certain period of aging, because of that age, there’s a belief I would say, that a structure needs to be replaced. When in actuality maybe it can be extended for another 60 years. There’s no reason why these structures can’t be extended indefinitely, given the right maintenance program, given the right proper attention to detail like a company like Exo.

Mike Miller:

That type of thinking is everywhere. And of course engineering we learn from school, even university days, about build new. You learn how to build new. The emphasis is always to build new, yet we don’t really discuss in university the idea of extension, life extension, and what’s involved in really assessing a structure for life extension. Our focus is of course life extension, and now if a structure needs to be replaced. Okay. If there’s so many things that are degraded, it’s been neglected over the years and it’s corroding everywhere, well then at that point, perhaps there’s a point of no return. But that point of no return where you assess the cost of maintaining a structure or bringing it up to the current standard versus outright replacing the line, that difference is a lot different than it used to be.

Mike Miller:

The cost of construction, of new construction in the US has skyrocketed just over the last 10 years, labor costs, construction costs, material costs, all these things-

Zachary Oliphant:

Environmental impacts.

Mike Miller:

Environmental impact. All these things have really increased. And so I think looking at that from that perspective and looking at the condition of the line and assessing these key areas that only need attention, I think is really key. And of course it’s important that we highlight those areas and communicate those to the utilities so that they can understand to make a decision on whether they need to make that full replacement or whether they can extend these structures for another year and how other years and how they can actually do that.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And all of that cost ultimately rolls down to you and I and every other consumer of electric power, right?

Mike Miller:

Absolutely.

Zachary Oliphant:

When that cost is passed into our rates and we all have to pay for those things. And so certainly at least having the tools and the skills to evaluate your options is really valuable. We’re starting to see as a business and as an industry, more and more folks saying, wait a second, we don’t always have to rebuild new. I think you’re right, some of that’s really being driven by some of these challenges. Right aways are harder and harder to acquire, environmental impacts, dealing with landowners, those are all really tough challenges in construction, which is, as you said, driving the cost up and allows options like ours to extend the life of assets for decades, a really viable option.

Zachary Oliphant:

Walk me through, Mike, maybe an example in your history where someone taught you something that was just like an epiphany moment, right? Where maybe you were dug in a position and you said, okay, I think I’m right. I’m right. I’m right. And you’re holding your ground. And then all of a sudden, oh, wait a second, that’s an interesting perspective, maybe I should integrate that. And that you mentioned continuing to learn. Unpack that a little bit for me.

Mike Miller:

Sure. Our industry is a little unique in the world of structural design, structural structures, in that many of the structures that we design are full scale tested. Now, lattice is generally full scale tested because of all the complexities of all the connections. Tubular steel poles are based on structural components that have been full scale tested as well. That in itself allows us to really understand and comprehend the value of the structure, okay? And know it’s true capacity. If you compare that to a building where you’re using load factors and other factors to assess and capture the uncertainty of the loading on a building with all the different things that are in a building and all the load paths, it’s very highly redundant system. Our structures are full scale tested, they’re verified.

Mike Miller:

And so now as part of that verification process, we learn new things. I get surprised with every test. With every single test that I’m involved with, I’m learning a new thing. That might be the cross brace and the load flow through the cross brace. It may be a particular connection, a number of bolts or an angle, which is made, we use mainly the angle shape to make all of the connections for a lattice tower, and that’s an ideal shape for that because of the different flanges. But we assume in analysis that the load flows through those flanges in an equal way across the area of the full shape. In reality, the load goes through the angle in a slightly different way than what we assume. And so you might get more load in one flange than the other flange. And so these types of things are always new learning opportunities that we find when we test.

Mike Miller:

We always find something new that we learn when we test. And it’s because we’re taking it to the limit. In fact we’re testing it. Normally we test it to failure. We really understand what the structure will be able to take in the environment that it’s subjected to, whether that’s wind, high wind, extreme wind, hurricane wind, ice, ice with concurrent wind, heavy ice, or a security load like a broken conductor and its effect on the adjacent conductors, so we can avoid a catastrophic domino effect or longitudinal cascade of structural failure. All these things we continue to learn, even though it’s a very old industry in terms of age, 70, 80, 90, 100 years old, and we’ve used structures and they’re all over the US. They’re all over the world. They’re used worldwide. We continue to learn and enhance our knowledge, because we’re using them in different ways now.

Mike Miller:

We’re coming up with different configurations to meet our needs. And so it’s always fascinating for me to continue the learning process and to really learn, but also apply what I’ve learned to new design or new evaluation of the structures. But I say that it’s also important to look back at the history, because one of the first things that I do, and we do a lot of analysis of older structures, right? That have been in service for 50 years. We have to first understand and really get into the head of the original design engineer and the assumptions that were used in the original design, because that will help us really understand what’s happening with the structure. And that can change from structure to structure. The public looks at a steel structure and they look all the same, they look like they’re identical.

Zachary Oliphant:

Manufacturers would be happy if they were all the same. Right?

Mike Miller:

They would. But in fact they’re different. They have different characteristics, different wire sizes, which produce different loads. All these things that go into the design and analysis of these structures is very, very unique across the US. And there must be over four or 500 different wire sizes alone that are used in the US, from copper all the way to the new hybrid type of conductors. And that of course goes through the structure and that’s what we’re supporting. The wire size drives everything. It’s important to really understand that, and testing helps us do that.

Zachary Oliphant:

Well, it’s interesting Mike, you mentioned that the testing and structures being really designed to fail, right? Which is somewhat unique as an engineer in our industry. Walk me through the desire to deal with the practicality of engineering and the conservativeness in engineering that’s natural. You wanted to just hold the load and there’s this pressure, somewhat pressure as an engineer I can imagine, that you always want to pass the test, but just passing the flying colors is a problem too. Walk me through that balance for you all as engineers who are trying to get it right.

Mike Miller:

There is a balance between the economies of a design, the efficiencies of the design and the use and the cost. Right? You’re always balancing that cost. The first thing we do as engineers is we need to know what our lines are going to be subjected to for the next 100 years in terms of load. What kind of extreme winds? What kind of extreme loading are we talking about? And that’s become already very complicated with climate change. All of a sudden now we have a new variable to figure out, and how we can implement climate change and capture the effects of climate change, because the climate is not only heating, but it’s also cooling. The volatility between the heating and cooling cycles are much more say volatile than in the past, and how that affects the transmission line, which is placed over the landscape like a big net to collect all the storms.

Mike Miller:

We have to understand that, and we have to know the impact of any load differences, so that we can incorporate them in the design or, and also do provide some assurances to the public that we’re actually looking at this. And we are, we’re actively looking at the impacts of climate change on our systems, the additional load or in some cases, the reduction in load due to climate change. It’s become a very big challenge.

Zachary Oliphant:

Well, it’s interesting, Mike, you mentioned the loads and the standards and the codes that drive our industry. Walk me through a little bit your experience. You’ve sat on lots of different committees. You’ve chaired various committees. I guess, number one, walk me through what you are doing today, and then maybe give me a little bit of historical perspective on your view of the value of sitting through that process, which is sometimes a slow and arduous process, but the value that you get out, or you think other engineers, especially young engineers coming up could get out of being involved.

Mike Miller:

Sure. It’s always great to be a volunteer in some of these standards activities, and whether that’s the American society of civil engineers, or whether it’s the IEEE or CIGRE or some of the others, ASME, things like that. It’s always very good for not only your knowledge, to improve your knowledge, but it’s also good to be able to have a voice in that process and the decision making process for new standard developments or manuals of practice developments. And so, yes, I’m in several right now. I’m chairing the loading standard, which is a brand new standard in the US here under ASCE, it’s called the loading standard. It doesn’t have a number yet, but it involves elevating the manual practice 74, which is the loading standard, how we use to get loads up to an elevated standard that can be used by states as a model code to implement.

Mike Miller:

And so I’m involved with that right now. We have our first face to face meeting next week. With COVID it’s been a little difficult to get together. And then I’m also involved with ASCE 10 standard, which is the lattice design standard, which is an older standard, but it needs to be updated by definition every five years in order to be relevant. And then ASCE 48, which is the pole standard, same thing. Poles in terms of strengths. And then I’m also on the substation 113 manual of practice. Now the difference between a manual practice and a standard is a manual practice is optional, recommended. It’s a manual of practice that can be, it’s optional basically.

Mike Miller:

A standard is higher elevation, but it still, unless it’s a mandatory standard and these aren’t mandatory standards, but it’s really could be referenced then at the state level and brought under and made minimum loads as required. It’s similar in that way to ASCE 7, which is the minimum loads for building standard, that other standard I’m working on.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And for young engineers, what would you say, what value could they get out of participating in some of these committees?

Mike Miller:

Of course it’s always difficult when you’re a younger engineer to get involved in a standard because you’re usually heavily involved in learning new things just to get your work done. But if you ever are in an opportunity to be able to volunteer on a standard, you get so much out of it, just being around the same like-minded people that have that experience that you can gleam, much of what I’ve learned is by going to these standards or manuals of practice meetings. Because it’s not only meeting and discussing, but it’s listening, it’s comprehending new things that may not even get into the standard. A lot of the benefit of that is a standard process is a consensus standard. So you’re not going to get all the great ideas. It’s going to be whatever you can reach a consensus on.

Mike Miller:

There’s going to be certain ideas that are presented or discussed, that are lost. If you’re not there, if you’re not in the room and you’re not listening, you might not hear some of these great ideas, which could then develop over time and then actually get into the standard with enough consensus.

Zachary Oliphant:

I think too with some of the other folks in our business that sit on these committees and standards, is you lose a little bit of how the committee got to a consensus. Right? What was the horse trading if you will, and understanding how it was built, and then coupling that with the intent of what you’re trying to accomplish with whatever portion of the manual practice or standard of code. I think that gets lost on some people sometimes if you’re not in the room as you’re mentioning, some of the intent doesn’t always necessarily make it into the verbiage that everyone is being held to. Right?

Mike Miller:

That’s right.

Zachary Oliphant:

Walk me through, Mike, in your career, you mentioned testing and failures. I imagine in some of those tests, things didn’t go the way you wanted and something failed prematurely. Walk me through the experience of learning from a failure. Sometimes people say a mistake or what have you. Why is that valuable for engineers, and what do you learn when that happens?

Mike Miller:

As I say, the industry is unique in that we actually do test full scale our structures and apply all the loads, and we see failures. Now what that means is, again, it’s not a failure as we know the word is a failure, like you’re a failure. It’s not like that. It’s a learning opportunity. And in fact we expect, if we don’t see a failure, then maybe we’re being too conservative. Right? Since we’re designing to failure, and so if let’s say for example, we design a line for 120 mile an hour load, 120 mile an hour wind load. And on that particular span, well, if conceivably if it reaches 121, we would expect the structure to fail. That’s the idea of designing to failure. Now, no one likes to see structures fail, and that’s why actually historically the industry has done very, very well.

Mike Miller:

Utilities have failures, and there are failures every year from excessive wind, excessive ice and so forth. But in general I think we’ve had a very good record of failure. And it’s because we are so diligent about design, about doing it the right way. And then of course as an engineer, that’s designing right on the line. If you don’t see that failure, you’ll notice that, and maybe you’re over, as I said, you’re being too conservative. But in general, overall we see roughly after for every test, about 15% of the time, we actually see a failure. Now that’s a lot of failures, but again, failure is not a bad word, failure is a good word.

Zachary Oliphant:

Certainly as a learning opportunity and when it’s done in that controlled environment. I think you’re right, Mike, I think for the most part, all of the failure investigation work we do at Exo, most of the issues we’re finding are not on the design side. It’s usually on the manufacturing side, right?

Mike Miller:

That’s right.

Zachary Oliphant:

It’s the application of those designs and the execution of those designs that have been tested and vetted usually and reviewed, it’s usually the application or the execution of the manufacturing of those goods. That part’s its own challenge. Maybe as a quick question for you, Mike, as an engineer where you’re trying to design something up to failure or close to failure, and now you’re taking your hands off and you say, okay, now someone else has to go build it and construct it and maintain it. Maybe walk me through how you think about that as an engineer and those various other trades people that have to touch this material you’ve designed and hopefully design it close to a point where it will fail when it needs to.

Mike Miller:

And that’s a very good point. In the design world, in the engineering world, we assume, we make the perhaps incorrectly, but we assume that a piece of steel is a piece of steel. Right? A weld is a weld. The dimensions of that steel are correct. There’s those certain inherent assumptions in that process. But we know firsthand on what we see that a weld is not a weld. A weld is a weld and has to be done according to the codes and standards, AWS D1.1 in our case. And it has to be done correctly. The same with fabrication of any component. If the holes are off, if there’s some deviations and they’re not taken into account in design, then it’s not going to perform the way that it was designed and it was intended to, and that could be a problem.

Mike Miller:

The way that we can get around that, or the way that we can handle that is by inspection. We need to verify, trust, but verify. We need to verify that the components that we’ve designed or that any engineer has designed is being fabricated correctly. And if you’re not watching that process, if you’re not verifying that process yourself or through another party, things can go awry. We’ve seen that. And as you say, all of the, I say the majority of the issues that we see in the industry are because of this issue with fabrication.

Zachary Oliphant:

I find it very interesting, our industry, certainly around the utility space, the primary warranty that you see given by manufacturers is one or two year material workmanship warranty. Right? And that’s a very small window for something that should last 40, 50, 60 years, or that you’re designing to last 40 or 50 or 60 years. I always find it somewhat amazing when you talk to utilities and you just say, hey guys, you like, are you understanding conceptually you’re carrying 48 or 58 or 68 years of the life of the structure under you as the asset owner’s responsibility versus the manufacturer’s responsibility. I know in this trust but verify, Mike, that you’re referencing, we’ve been very fortunate. We had a client here in the south that they called us out. They saw they had a problem and they said, hey, we need to get some expertise in to look at this issue for us.

Zachary Oliphant:

And it just so happened that they engaged Exo about a month before their commercial warranty ran out. In that particular case, the warranty dollars the manufacturer spent has been in the tens of millions to try to resolve these manufacturing related defects. And for this particular client, it was just luck. It was just luck that someone said, hey, we think we have a problem, which it’s great that when an engineer sees something, they say, we think we have a problem. But then to say, I need to do something about it, engage somebody that has the expertise to solve it. And in that scenario we end up saving the utility tens of millions of dollars that a month later would’ve been their warranty responsibility, right? The utility would’ve been maintaining that.

Zachary Oliphant:

And that part I find very interesting in our space for so long, we’ve been trusting, trusting, trusting, trusting. And we used to do a lot of verifying back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, when a lot of these structures were relatively new and people were still trying to get comfortable with them. Utilities used to send a lot of folks in the factory and oversee this verification process you’re talking about. And over the years that’s stopped and you’ve seen less and less and less of the utilities putting people in the factory and you have this big gap. And now low and behold, you’re having all of these manufacturing problems. Right?

Zachary Oliphant:

And we haven’t seen, at least in our experience, utilities going back to that, putting people in the plant, they’re relying on subject matter experts like Exo to do some of that work

Mike Miller:

You’ll wonder what’s changed. And so what has changed though? What’s changed between the 60s and 70s? Even if you have people in there, it used to be that you’d have a tubular steel pole and there’d be a defect and maybe the consequences weren’t great, that wouldn’t cause a failure, that wouldn’t cause a problem. But what’s different now is our tools. We have computers, we have processes that allow us to design these structures down to the minimized weight. And when we design to the minimized absolute minimized weight, again, meeting the requirements, but in the past, they were designed much more conservatively from a design perspective. So you had some more meat in the design that you could take advantage of.

Mike Miller:

And so perhaps you wouldn’t need a weld that was absolutely perfect. Whereas now you need that weld to be absolutely perfect because you’ve minimized the material, because you have the tools to be able to do that. And so that’s been really the change in the industry, is you have these tools and everything is being designed that way. It used to be that a structure for a span, you design the structure for the full span, and then perhaps it would only be used at 80% of that span. And so you have this 20% extra buffer, so you would. Well now you can use the program to spot structures and be so optimal that you use 98% of the structure capacity with every structure. So you don’t have that buffer anymore.

Mike Miller:

And so as a result of that, everything becomes hyper critical. The welds, the position of the vangs, the position of everything becomes much more critical, whereas, versus in the past it could be more loose.

Zachary Oliphant:

You’re right. And so it’s really taken the onus that was primarily on engineers, and now with software where you can get everything really fine tuned, it’s shifted a lot more responsibility to the folks manufacturing and the folks inspecting on the shop floor. Right? And like you said, now you got to build it almost perfect. And if you don’t build it perfect you’re going to have some real problems. And we see that all the time. As I think Mike in your career and you sit and think about integrity and this is Integrity podcast, walk me through how that word applies to your career, how you see that applied to the industry and maybe an example of integrity and what you do every day.

Mike Miller:

Well, to me, integrity is everything. It builds trust. If you don’t have the trust, you don’t have the integrity. But what I like to use or think about when I just in everything, my family situations, my work situations, I have a set of four, it’s a four way test that I use, and this actually comes from rotary. But before that it came from another issue that happened in Chicago, way back, many, many years ago. And that is, number one, is it the truth? Number two, is it fair to all concerned? Okay? Number three, will it build better friendships and goodwill or goodwill and friendships? Either way. And four, is it beneficial all to all concerned?

Mike Miller:

And if you apply those four steps, those four tests to any situation, then you’re going to have integrity, you’re going to have trust and you’re going to build all these things that are desirable in our society. And so those are the things that I use to help me make sure that I’m being the person I really want to be in dealing with issues, any issue or-

Zachary Oliphant:

It’s very insightful, Mike. And you think about trying to apply those four items. Like you said, whether it’s in your personal life or it’s an engineering challenge. Right? If you can apply those four items, you’re taking the client’s view into account, the fabricator view into account, the line construction guys view into account, and you’re just trying to come with the best solution. I think that’s so much of what our business tries to do is surround ourselves with all these highly technical people. Sometimes we get in these fun discussions about who’s right, who’s more right, or who’s better. But it’s all built upon trying to get the best solution for the client.

Mike Miller:

That’s right.

Zachary Oliphant:

I think as long as you’re using that integrity and that best solution for the client as guiding principles on how you’re getting there, I think ultimately what we’ve seen is you land at a really good spot for the client. And usually when you get to the best solution, it includes the best way to deal with it in the field, the most economical way of resolving an issue. And like you said, you do that enough times it builds trust, it builds trust with the clients and you have to have that in the type of work that we all do, whether it’s engineering, inspection, what have you, as soon as you lose that you’re in trouble.

Mike Miller:

That’s right.

Zachary Oliphant:

Big trouble. The last question I have for you, Mike, is as you look back on your career and you’re thinking about a young student just coming out of school, engineering school, and you were to look to them or chat with them and you do some of this in your everyday career. What is the advice you would give them on how to be as an engineer, how to be as a person and how that can be valuable to them and to their career and then to whoever their employer is?

Mike Miller:

Right. My advice is to younger students that I meet or talk to, is to have an attitude of being a lifelong learner. When you get out of school that doesn’t end your learning. You need to keep learning. And in fact you do normally in engineering. Engineering is all about continuing to learn and applying those things that you’ve learned to new projects and new relationships, relationships evolve and learn the same way. You would apply the same thing to your work environment as you would in your personal environment. Things evolve and change, and usually always get better. You might have some points of going down or hiccups along the way, but in general, continue to have the positive attitude, continue to know that things are going to be get better and they always do. And having that attitude with everything in your life is I think important.

Zachary Oliphant:

Mike, one of the that’s interesting to me is thinking about how all the structures that you deal with every day and our team deals with every day, how do they impact the grid, not only today, but as you look forward in the future?

Mike Miller:

What’s interesting about the grid is it’s considered one of the most complex machines that human beings have ever produced. Very complex. Think about electricity is you need to use it the instantly moment that you make it. It has to be used and created, created and used. That process of course has to be balanced. With our structures, of course we’re supporting all these lines and we’re making sure that they’re resisting all of the loads. And the thing about lines is you have normally a grid is developed based on assuming what’s called an N-1 contingency event. What that means is any one line can go out of service and the rest of the grid will backfeed itself and keep the grid up and stabilized. Because if you start losing two or more lines to any portion of the grid, you can start affecting the voltage and that voltage drops. And then you start having to shed load. There’s a whole remediation scheme involved in the operation of the grid.

Mike Miller:

And so our structures are critically important of course, that they’re strong enough and they withstand the storm events that we expect them to withstand, such that these N-2 events if they occur or what’s called black sky events, very, very large storms will not impact the grid. An example of that was, is super storm Sandy. Okay? Remember when that occurred on the Eastern seaboard, it took a lot of structures. They lost over 80,000 wood poles in the distribution side. But the transmission side, that’s the backbone, it remained pretty well. It didn’t really get affected that much. And so, again, very good performance on the grid.

Mike Miller:

And so we have to keep in mind and keep that to the center of our mind that we understand our process that we use for design is critically important to keep the grid up and running. Because outages are not acceptable today. They’re much less acceptable today than they were even 20 years ago. It’s important and we have a lot of pressure to keep that going. And so we need to do due diligence on the engineering side to make sure that we meet the requirements of the load, make sure that we are doing what we need to do to keep this system in check and doing it with integrity of course.

Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. It is always interesting, Mike, where a lot of folks that aren’t in our industry, you just turn the light switch on and you expect it to work. It is a very complicated system to go from generation to light switch working and all of the hardworking men and women that make that happen behind the scenes. It’s a terribly complex industry. I’m always excited about our impact on that industry and how we can help support our clients, which is just fantastic. Well, Mike, I really appreciate your time here today and your insights and your knowledge and your experience. I want to thank you for all that you bring to Exo, which is really, really valuable. Hopefully the folks that are listening today, especially young engineers or utility operators, learn something today. Really appreciate your guidance and expertise at Exo. Thank you, Mike. Really appreciate the time.

Mike Miller:

You’re welcome. Thank you.