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:

What an awesome opportunity to chat on our integrity podcast. Got two distinguished guests. I mean these guys are industry icons. Between them, they’ve got almost 80 years or 80 plus years in our industry. So want to welcome Otto Lynch, CEO of Power Line Systems and Wes Oliphant, which is CTO of Exo. A little brief background on these folks. So let me start with Wes. So Wes is principal and also chief technical officer at Exo located in Houston, Texas. He began his professional career in 1974 as a civil engineering officer in the US Air Force. He has since accumulated over 46 years of professional experience related to the structural design, manufacturing, inspection, remediation, of wood poles, tubular steel poles, prestressed concrete poles, fiberglass composite poles, as well as lattice steel towers.

 Zachary Oliphant:

In 2010, Mr. Oliphant received ASE’s Gene Wilhoite Award presented by the Structural Engineering Institute for his lifetime contributions to our industry. Wes is also a fellow charter member, Structural Engineering Institute, American Science Civil Engineers, as well as current chairman of ASCE’s Committee of Electrical Transmission Structures. He’s also a member of ASCE’S Committee of America’s Infrastructure, having worked on the 2021 energy infrastructure report card and a member of IEEE, where he serves on subcommittee five strengths and loadings, to the NESC. So, a lot going on there, Wes.

Wes Oliphant:

Plenty. You read it just way I wrote it.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Likewise, Otto is another industry icon. Otto’s got 34 plus years as a distinguished professional. His career began electrical substation, transmission line design and construction of numerous transmission line projects around the world up to 500 KV. His professional interest and personal passion for innovation transmission line design software led to an eventual position as president and CEO of Power Line Systems and he continues to oversee all areas of the business, focusing on key areas of growth. Otto is a registered professional engineer and active member of ASCE, IEEE, ANC, and other technical committees including the ASE 48 Steel Pole Transmission Structures Committee and the ASE 10 Lattice Steel Transmission Structures Committee where he’s currently vice chair.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Otto is also a voting member of Subcommittee Five as well as the main committee of NESC. And Otto was a recent recipient of the ASC Walter P. Moore Junior Award in recognition of his technical expertise and development of structural codes and standards. That’s a lot. I mean, we can almost fill the whole podcast just on you all’s credentials. I thought maybe it would make sense, Wes, I mean you and Otto go back, have a big history together. Maybe you just introduce your personal relationship with Otto, maybe some of the things you guys have done, and Otto maybe we’ll have you do the same.

Wes Oliphant:

Well, I was thinking about that because where did you and I meet? I think it was on a beach in California somewhere at a conference. Doug Sherman and I and you I think we ended up walking the beach drinking a beer and talking about all the things that needed to be done in our industry. And from there it’s flourished, I think, almost 30 something years now.

Otto Lynch:

Something like that. And I think we solved all the problems.

Wes Oliphant:

I think we solved all the problems.

Otto Lynch:

Solved all the problems.

Wes Oliphant:

Didn’t have any more to solve after that.

Otto Lynch:

Yeah, I think we may have maybe indirectly met before that just at industry meetings and stuff like that. Of course, I knew of you and your reputation, but we ended up at that meeting in California. You, me and Doug just had a nice evening and we just walked the beach and got to know each other personally, and I’ve been very fortunate to have Wes as a friend ever since then.

Wes Oliphant:

Likewise.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Well, fantastic. Well, maybe Otto, we start with where did your career begin? I mean, I think that’s always interesting discussions. When folks have been dedicated in the industry as long as you all have hearing your origin story, I think, is really meaningful.

Otto Lynch:

Sure, yeah. My dad was a land surveyor and so probably about eight years old I started working for him and working full-time summers. He picked me up after school on some days, and I would be the rodman holding the rod and often held the dumb end of the tape as he would say and take this. And he had the smart end. I finally got promoted to chief transit setter upper where I would get to set the transit up and level it and get everything all set up while he was in the truck doing the calculations for what we were going to be doing. I grew up in that industry and really enjoyed it, just absolutely loved it. And I thought I was going to be a surveyor. My dad did own a survey company I should say. And probably I was about 14 as I talking about, okay, what are we going to do when I get old enough to get in here?

Otto Lynch:

And he said, well, tell you what, you go to school and get your engineering degree, and then we’ll talk about you taking over the business. He’s like, you need to do more than that. And he had missed the opportunity to get his degree in engineering, and so he wanted to make sure I had that opportunity. And so probably about 14 or so, he’s always like engineering, okay, civil engineering. All right, what do they do? Well, they design buildings and bridges and dams and as I say, sometimes targets. So we build the targets.

Otto Lynch:

I ended up going to Rolla, University of Missouri, Rolla, UMR, now it’s called Missouri S&T, Science and Technology, but we still call it Rolla, which by the way is where my son’s going to school right now. So he’s following my footsteps on that. I really liked civil engineering, got into the structural side of it, really enjoyed the structures part of it, and it came time to getting ready for graduation. I started doing all the campus interviews with any company I could get an interview with. I thought I was going to be designing buildings and bridges and maybe a dam or two.

Otto Lynch:

I even had one very interesting lead, I shouldn’t say I got the job offer, but it was an interesting lead to design sports stadiums. I was kind of like, oh man, okay. I love football, I love baseball, and I could design a sports stadium. So it was very interesting. But then I don’t want to say my last interview, but finally Dave Taylor from Black & Veatch came. I’m sitting there telling him what I want do, and he goes, I want somebody to design transmission lines. I was like, I had one class in electrical engineering, and I slept through it. This is not what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be designing bridges.

Otto Lynch:

And anyway, I told Dave that, and Dave said, no offense to any electrical engineers out there, but Dave said, once you size the wire, everything else is civil, structural.

 Zachary Oliphant:

That’s a good way of putting it.

Otto Lynch:

And then Dave went on to say, it’s like a bunch of suspension bridges and you get to do everything. All disciplines are involved. Sure enough, I mean we’re talking surveying, geotechnical engineering, grading, structural design, construction management. And Dave also told me, he said, if you do this, you’re going to get to do a whole bunch of them. If you design bridges, you may design four or five bridges in your life. And he goes, you do this, you’re going to be doing four or five transmission lines in your first year. And that really attracted me. So when I graduated, I took that job and went to Black & Veatch, and it was in 1988 and have been doing transmission engineering ever since.

 Zachary Oliphant:

So walk me through. In 1988, you’re a new engineer at Black & Veatch and you’ve got to go design transmission line. What tools were at your disposal at the time to go do that? Things have certainly changed since then.

Otto Lynch:

Well, good grief. I was never afraid of computers. Luckily, I was right at the generation in college, and we had a very, very early CAD system, and I just loved it. I enjoyed doing things like that. So when I got to Black & Veatch, they were like, we got this new little program, it’s called Tower, it’s DOS based and you have to slide the floppies in for each thing you do. Nobody else wanted to touch it. And so to answer your question, I started doing a lot of Towers almost immediately using what is Power Line Systems Tower software. Dr. Peyrot had done that many, many years ago. Like I said, it was DOS based. You had to flip a floppy out anytime you do the coding and then you do the analysis and then you’d look at the graphics. We thought that was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Otto Lynch:

People now are like, yeah, but that takes two days. I only have two minutes. So it’s kind of fun. But that’s how I got involved in the software side of that.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Sounds good. So you’re a junior engineer at Black & Veatch, you started designing transmission structures, kind of what’s the next iteration in your career? So you’re doing that for a few years, you get that experience under your belt, and then where does it go from there?

Otto Lynch:

Sure. Black & Veatch had kind of a, I don’t know if it was ever written or unwritten, but basically it was understood if you wanted to advance in your career, you needed a field assignment. You had to go out in the field and get your boots dirty and your Carhart dirty. Another blessing that just happened. A good opportunity came up. A hundred and plus mile 345 KV line from Corpus Christi down in your neck of the woods, and so I got the opportunity to go there for year and a half and be the resident engineer on the project.

Otto Lynch:

And I was there early enough, even helping right away agents acquire right away and clearing and drilling foundation soil borings to get the foundations and eventually the structure construction and erection. It was both lattice towers and tubular steel wire pulling all the way through the final commissioning of the power line. To see that from beginning to end was a great experience. And just learning from the lineman, I would just sit there. I was like a sponge, teach me. And they were having fun teaching me, and I just learned so much more out in the field. You could sit at a desk for 10 years and never learn what you learned in a month out in the field.

 Zachary Oliphant:

It’s certainly a common thing we hear from a lot of folks that we sit down and chat with. It’s this get out in the field and go experience the actual work being done. Y

Otto Lynch:

Yes.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Now was this a line you designed and then you’re seeing it get constructed as well or did you participate in the design?

Otto Lynch:

I was one of the engineers on that project. I wasn’t the engineer. That was a little bit before PLS CADD, and so it took about 10-12 people to do a decent project. It wasn’t a one person job.

Wes Oliphant:

Back when you’re using templates for planning profile drawings.

Otto Lynch:

Yes, plastic templates, the slide rules of our industry. Yes, we were using templates and that was to kind of get back to your earlier question. There was this little program called Lotus 1-2-3, and nobody wanted to touch it. I wrote spreadsheets for foundations. We’re talking construction schedules of the diameter and the depth of all the foundations and the pull links from the center hubs and wrote just big spreadsheets. Basically we used the spreadsheets and really didn’t even have to get too much into the drawings because you could just follow the schedule. I was using Lotus to do a lot of stuff like that and just loved it.

Wes Oliphant:

Tell the story, Otto, you had mentioned it to me before about when you were working for your dad pulling the chain, doing the surveying, but you didn’t know it at the time, but that was your introduction to sag attention on cables.

Otto Lynch:

Yeah, I was just thinking about that last night as a matter of fact. When I was eight, nine, 10, back then we didn’t have the theodolite and everything else. We had to pull change. Think about a 300 foot long steel tape, and at that point in time you had to pull it up to a certain tension. We even had a scale like a fish scale if you want to call it that. And you had to pull the cable to that certain tension and you had to hold it really high because of the sag of the tape. And then you had to hold a plum bob and you had to pull 30 pounds and hold a plum bob right over a pin this big around. As a 10 year old skinny kid, that’s kind of hard to do.

Wes Oliphant:

Dad yanking on the other end.

Otto Lynch:

Yeah, if I wasn’t doing a good job, he’d yank it. Then you’ve got to start all over again physically and everything else. We’d do that and we’d have to know the temperature outside. Pulling that tape in December is going to be a lot different than in July, and sometimes it wasn’t pulling the full 300, you’re pulling 200 or something like that. And so at that time we didn’t have tension software and it was basically a set of charts, and we’d look at the charts and do a calculation.

Otto Lynch:

Instead of pulling 300 feet, we might pull 300 feet and four tenths in order to get the proper sag and elongation of the chain and everything else to take that into account. I didn’t really understand what I was doing back then, but we were doing sag tension calculations.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Which obviously is a great corollary for what you do today on the transmission business where you’re doing the same thing with conductor.

Otto Lynch:

Yes.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Steel and aluminum conductor and how they’re affected by heat and tension. So you are involved in this big project in the field. You learn from all the line guys, which those guys will teach you so much spending time in the field.

Wes Oliphant:

They’ll teach you stuff you don’t want to know sometimes.

Otto Lynch:

I learned a lot of four letter words there.

 Zachary Oliphant:

So you complete that project, I’m sure it was a success. And then kind of walk me through the next step. So you’ve got the field experience, you’ve got kind of the line design experience, those two now.

Otto Lynch:

Yeah, I got back to the office and sure enough got promoted pretty quickly and got involved with a lot of international projects, not just doing the work but also working in the preliminary stages and helping to site and working with clients, which by the way, back on the field assignment one of the skills that I learned was social interaction, learning how to work with the linemen, learning how to work with the contractors, learning how to work with really mad landowners and just learning how to handle different situations. So there’s a lot of credibility in that, but getting back to the international assignments, so it was just kind of fun to work with different people around the world and understanding the different cultures. I got to go to Thailand for several stints, and those were kind of fun. We were looking at citing power lines, and I was working with the power plant group, so we were looking for places to put a power plant so that it would be close to a cooling source and have all that together at the same time.

Otto Lynch:

Not too long of a transmission line for an easy interconnect into their existing grid. Spent several months tramping around the back of Thailand looking for places like that. A lot of fun, a lot of cultural experience and stuff like that. So I got a good opportunity for that. And then ended up working in a lot of regional offices, worked in Dallas, worked in Orlando, worked in Ann Arbor, Boston, worked in a Boston office for a while, just working on projects locally. A couple of week assignments, a week on, and week off and stuff like that.

Otto Lynch:

And eventually they promoted me to manage their transmission lines in the Portland office. So we moved to Portland, and that was a lot of fun. Got to manage a lot of projects and people and stuff at that point in time.

 Zachary Oliphant:

You go from being obviously a junior engineer, now you’re a manager. And then walk me through the transition to PLS. I mean how did that come up? You’ve been obviously using their software since the early days.

Otto Lynch:

Like Wes said earlier, I had been using Tower and got to know Dr. Peyrot who’s the founder of the company. Probably in 1992 or so, he gave me a floppy and said, here’s a line design program that I’ve been working on, would you play with it? And I was like, sure. And it was PLS CADD. At that time it was called Computer Edited Line Design, CALD.

Wes Oliphant:

That’s what it was.

Otto Lynch:

But it eventually became PLS CADD. I’m sitting there playing with it, and I was like, this stuff is cool. His son Eric was doing a lot of the programming, I just started helping him and saying, hey, you need to do this, it’d be awesome if you could add this feature, and it’d be nice and helpful if you did this. And so just over the years I was helping them develop the software just from a practical side of it. And it was a lot of fun working with them. And then to answer your question, probably around 2000, long story short, Alan and I got to talking and he said, Hey, what would you think about coming to work for me? And I was like, the only thing I know about C plus plus is how to spell it.

Otto Lynch:

Dr. Peyrot said, exactly, we’ve got the software programming expertise, we just need somebody that can do everything else. It was very difficult.

Wes Oliphant:

You’ve got to get somebody to understand how it works and how it’s going to be applied in the field.

Otto Lynch:

To continue to bring more closer engineering applications to the software to make sure that it was dovetailed together to be productive. And so, yeah, I made a very, very difficult decision. It was a hard one to make, very hard one to make, but I decided to leave Black & Veatch on good terms, very good terms. I’ve been with them for 12 years and made a lot of good friends and a lot of people that my shares respect that I’ve respected and took a cut in pay, a major cut in benefits. But I believed in it.

Wes Oliphant:

Went to work for a little startup up at Madison, Wisconsin.

Otto Lynch:

I wouldn’t call it quite a startup, it was a little bit, but at the same time it was a risky company.

Wes Oliphant:

Dr. Peyrot was still a professor, wasn’t he at University of Madison or had he left?

Otto Lynch:

Yes, he was still a professor at the university, but he did retire shortly after that. But, yeah, it was a huge, huge risk to do that. But like I said, I believed in it, and I knew what it could do and just seemed to be the right thing to do. And like I said, it was very hard, very hard to leave Black & Veatch. Great company. And I didn’t burn any bridges and I’m still good friends with all the people that are still there.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Yeah, I bet. I mean, it’s always a tough jumping off point to do something like that. I mean, Black & Veatch being such a large consulting organization and you are growing your career there really effectively. But to have the vision to say, I want to go do something different and really do something revolutionary with the software that they were building, you were helping them build is really fun and impressive to see.

 Zachary Oliphant:

So kind of flash forward, now you’re at PLS and getting involved in their business and helping kind of run the day to day. Kind of walk me through that to get us to where you are today.

Otto Lynch:

That was kind of another one of my opportunities. I’ve just been unbelievably blessed to different parts of my life, just the right place at the right time, making the right decisions. Not always, made a few wrong ones, but most of them have been good. But that was a good time. And Dr. Peyrot was looking to slow down, to eventually retire, and he was very active in the industry. And I had been somewhat active when I was at Black & Veatch. I was going to ASE meetings, IEEE meetings and participating. But Dr. Peyrot basically said, Hey, I need you to start taking over some of my committee membership participation. And so the first one I jumped on was 48 Tubular Steel Poll and eventually got on ASE 10 and some other ones throughout the time. But the whole doing that was trying to make sure that our software was always current with the latest codes and standards and be able to help the industry move into the next generation especially when it comes to using computers and software to do design and analysis and stuff like that.

Wes Oliphant:

I think that’s one of the areas that Otto and I both, you talk about the right place at the right time, but we both started when there were no such things as computers essentially. I’m a few years older than Otto, so I didn’t have a calculator. Even the calculators didn’t even come about until I was a senior in college. So from calculators to computers now to really sophisticated software that does these things, it’s been a pretty transformational move for us as an industry, hasn’t it?

Otto Lynch:

It has, and it’s changing every day. I mean, with all the other things that are going on and integrations and AI and everything else. And a lot of people dream, and I’m like, it’s great to dream, but sometimes we need to control those dreams and take them in step processes. But, yeah, it’s a rapidly changing industry.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Walk me through just a little bit Otto for maybe folks that don’t use PLS software today, just kind of elevator speech on what the software does, what value it brings to your clients. You guys are the leading folks in the world on line design software. Maybe just kind of pitch that for a second.

Otto Lynch:

Sure. Probably the best way to describe it is it does everything for overhead line design. As I mentioned earlier, we’re talking survey, terrain development, foundation design, geotechnical, structural analysis and design, wire stringing, sag tension analysis, of course, with all the construction reporting that’s required so that the lineman and the folks in the field can build a line, all the way to documentation. And, of course, today with GIS and the digital twin being the digital twin of what was built out there. So we pretty much handle all of that.

Otto Lynch:

We’re both the horizontal and the vertical company. Horizontal, everything we do is broad. People say, okay, we’ll buy your software. What other programs do I need to buy, and do I need to buy another sag tension program? No, we got it all. Do I need to buy a foundation program? No, we got that. Do I need to buy something to handle the mapping of GS application? No, we got that too. So we kind of do it all. And so in a nutshell, that’s what we do. Of course, I can go deeper, but in a nutshell that’s what we cover.

Wes Oliphant:

It is a lot more complex than most people think it is too, isn’t it? I mean just calculating the canary curve of a conductor is one thing, but then now putting it on a structure that’s moving around is another thing. And being able to take into account the temperature changes and how that affects the wire, all that’s built in.

Otto Lynch:

It’s all built in. Thank you. And, golly, it’s amazing. People think that transmission, oh, you’re just staple and wires to the pulse. No, it’s so complex. My son’s majoring in mechanical, and what do they tell you in mechanical engineering? Don’t mix two metals. What do we do? We take a steel cord and wrap aluminum around it and then change the temperature up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. We break every rule on that that comes in. But that’s what we’re able to calculate as the wires heat up and cool down the change in the different metals and how they behave as well as wind blowing out the conductors and ice on the conductors and combinations of wind device especially in today’s world with the vegetation analysis. Wires don’t stay where they are when you go survey them. We have to know when it gets hot.

Otto Lynch:

When we’re having those hot days in September, like they are in California right now, how far is that wire going to sag down when you get that. Maybe not a Santa Ana wind, but when you get a strong wind combined with that, how far is that wire going to blow out? Is it going to blow into the vegetation of the trees or hit too close to the ground? And that’s what we do.

Otto Lynch:

We can create that entire wire movement envelope. And as Wes said, it’s not just the wires moving, it’s insulators swinging out and it’s poles deflecting. A pole can deflect 10-12 feet easily underneath the higher wind. So add that 10 or 12 feet to a wire that’s blowing out 30 feet, you’re outside your right away all of a sudden.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And it’s interesting to hear you talk about this, Otto, because you guys are really synthesizing all of this complicated data into something that makes sense. In a lot of ways there’s corollaries to what we do with all the data we collect on the field side. Maybe, Wes, you can speak to that a little bit. I mean it’s very different than what Otto’s doing on sags intentions and loads, but same thing, you get all of this complicated data and you’ve got to synthesize it into something that makes sense to be able to deliver something to a client, right? That’s meaningful.

Wes Oliphant:

Yeah, I mean, we’ve used PLS CADD for doing some of our failure analysis. We just presented a paper this morning at TS Doss here that talked about that when you have a failure of one structure, what it does to the adjacent structures. We modeled it in PLS CADD to show that when that one structure started tilting over how the loads changed on the adjacent structures, and that was critical to understanding what caused 14 structures to fall down. Because otherwise you don’t know.

Wes Oliphant:

And we look at it from the health side, obviously. You and I have talked about that a lot. You look at it from new construction and everything is still in good shape. At some point we’re going to merge our technologies together and find out, okay, it’s good when it’s new, and here’s what it looks like when you’ve got 20% degradation happening on something. We collect a lot of data as well. We do very similar things, but not to the extent of involved in the line design part, but just in how to keep that structure healthy.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Yeah, absolutely. So Otto, one of the things I think you bring a unique position to our industry here in the US is your global perspective. Your software is used all over the world leading software. Maybe walk me through how it’s maybe different than what we deal with in the US, other places that you guys participate in. I know you’ve got friends in Europe that are having a really interesting energy crisis right now with everything going on in Ukraine. Maybe give a little commentary there.

Wes Oliphant:

Let me just add before you answer that question. I think, and you can chime in as well, but power lines are the same all over the world essentially. Everybody builds them essentially the same way, maybe different voltages, but we all have the same problem. It’s a global energy grid that we’re dealing with. I’ll let you go ahead.

Otto Lynch:

That’s very true. Something I say all the time, a wire is a wire is a wire; structure, structure, structure; wood is wood is wood; still, still, still; wind is wind is wind; ice is… It’s no different in Europe than it is here. They may have more of it, they may have less of it, they may have different combinations depending on their geographical region. Of course, some people in the world don’t have any ice at all. They’re really lucky because it’s a lot easier design when you don’t have ice, but you throw some ice on something and it becomes quite a difficult puzzle to solve. And then the other thing, probably the more difficult part, is when it comes to codes and standards. We’re kind of talking about ASE codes and standards and what Wes and I have been involved in for 20 plus years now, more for you. We have our codes but not everybody in Europe follows our code.

Otto Lynch:

They have their own codes, and they believe that wind blows differently. I don’t mean that negatively, I’m just saying we have our code where when you get higher there’s a certain equation that increases the wind speed just because it’s a function. Whenever you go up on top of a tall building or whatever, it’s windier, but there’s also less gusting. It’s less responsive. It’s more straight winds up high. There’s not anything. We here in the US, we pretty much use ice as a fixed number. We typically don’t apply it to the structures. It’s very insignificant when you look at an overall line design. You get in Europe and first of all they say well ice changes with height, not just wind, but ice changes with height. And they have different equations for what they believe the wind changes. I’m not saying we’re right, they’re wrong, they’re right, we’re wrong, they’re just different. Different philosophies and different ways of approaching the situation.

Otto Lynch:

And then in Europe they actually change the ice thickness with height, and that gets really difficult. But we do that and I’m just saying Europe since you asked that one, but every country just about is different. Even in Europe they’re different countries, they have a standard, but then they also have what they call an NNA or a national normative where Belgium would say, well, we use the standard but we changed these 10 things so we have to have an NNA for Belgium. We have to have an NNA for Germany. We have to have one for France. We have to have one for all these different places. So even though they may use the same code, they still make their own tweaks. And keeping up with that is quite difficult to be honest. But that’s why we are where we are because we do that all around the world.

Otto Lynch:

Just to wrap that question up, Australia, New Zealand, you start talking about other places, India and stuff like that, every one of those places we have to adapt to their codes and standards. Same stuff, same stuff, same design applications, it’s just different ways of calculating what that wind increase is going to be or whatever.

Wes Oliphant:

I think just to add to what Otto’s saying, I think that’s one of the values that we’re starting to see in the ASCE codes at standards because we have people that are involved in international work that now know this is what they’re doing in Australia, this is what they’re doing in Belgium. So I think from that standpoint it’s helpful that we look at all the different points of view and try to understand not anybody’s right, everybody’s right, but I think at the same time it’s good to hear what everybody’s different ways of doing things are. We can make it maybe some composite of that at some point in time.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. So you talk about the global perspective there Otto, and then let’s talk about the US. I mean the US energy grid is changing very rapidly and we’re in a scenario where it’s a very old industry, but it’s going through some very robust changes. All of the renewable energy that’s come online in the last 10 or 15 years, maybe a little longer, but 10 or 15 years, we’ve got EVs being rolled out in huge numbers. All that’s putting pressure on the grid. And then as we speak today, I mean there’s record high temperatures out in California, 125 in Death Valley. I think it’s almost a world heat record, and that puts major stress on our grid. Maybe just give a little bit of insight on all of that complexity and what you’re seeing in the industry.

Otto Lynch:

Sure. Gosh, it’s a little bit of everything, and that’s what makes it so difficult to keep up with. I mean, probably the first thing is our infrastructure’s old. It’s very old. Most of our infrastructure. The only thing is when you’re talking about power lines, you drive across the bridge, if you’re like me, you’re looking at the underside of the bridge and you see the rust. I know you guys are that big time. We can see all that stuff. To the average person, we feel every pothole. That’s infrastructure aging and we can fix that. Think about all the potholes and the rusting that’s going on on transmission lines when nobody looks at them. And I say potholes obviously not potholes, figuratively but literally, or I shouldn’t say literally, but figuratively, but what we would call a pothole. And so we’ve got these lines that are 50, 60, 70, a hundred years old out there and they need to be replaced, they need to be maintained.

Otto Lynch:

Some of them just need to be flat out replaced. And not jumping off topic too quick here, but it’s not like we can just tear it down and build a new one because our grid is so full right now, so at capacity we can’t take it out of service. And so we got that going on. As you mentioned, we have renewable energy going on and you can’t just moth ball a plant in Ohio, coal plant, and build a wind farm right there. You got to build a wind farm out in Kansas or Oklahoma.

Otto Lynch:

Well, then you have to get into how do we get that power back to Ohio so that can be distributed the way it normally was before that happened? And so we’re looking at this on a nationwide basis trying to, I call it rewiring America, just having to change things. The analogy I use sometimes is we’re changing the fuse panel in our house from one end to the other. We got to now totally rewire our house because our electricity’s coming in at a different area. And that’s not something you do overnight. It takes planning.

Otto Lynch:

And then the third part of that is we don’t know that planning. We don’t know where those wind farms are going to be five years from now. We’re more in a reactive state where we just have to, oh, wind farms coming on, they’re building a new one out in western Oklahoma. How are we going to get that power into Tennessee Valley?

 Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And that’s the part that a lot of folks don’t understand is just the sheer complexity of where you produce is not, especially on the renewable side, is not where it’s being consumed.

Wes Oliphant:

The traditional role is you build a power plant where your population center was and you have a very short distance to go to transmit the energy. Now we’re not doing that.

Otto Lynch:

And we’re telling everybody to use electric cars on top of all that.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Yep, no, absolutely. I mean, California’s grid I think hit above what they were expecting in peak demand this week. A year and a half ago Texas saw a catastrophic event on our grid here related to just trying to predict and model weather and all those sorts of things that you’re trying to do. And when you’re at or near capacity, it doesn’t take much to push you over the top. That’s for sure.

Otto Lynch:

I’d like to add one other thing, and that’s just something that we ought to deal with the public. The very people that want wind energy, solar energy, renewable, they don’t want the power line that’s got to have to bring it back. And so people will fight for a renewable energy source, and that’s great, but we got to have the extension cords that’s required to do that, and getting those built with the permitting that’s required these days, it’s not unusual for a line to take more than 10 years to get permitted, and we can build it in a year.

 Zachary Oliphant:

That’s right.

Wes Oliphant:

One of the other things, Otto, that I looked at with the winter storm event here in Texas is the difference between dispatchable versus non dispatchable energy. And we’re transitioning all of the generation to different forms of generation, but it used to be something that you could fire up the natural gas plant or the coal fire plant or the hydroelectric plant, flip the switch and it would come on. With wind turbines and with solar, you need that energy, you want that energy source, but if the wind’s not blowing when you flip the switch on, it’s not there. And so you’ve got to have a little bit of both. You’ve got to be able to make that balance.

Otto Lynch:

Getting back to your international question, and it’s something that we’re learning from our friends in Europe right now with the Russians cutting off the natural gas and with their problems with renewables and everything else, they’re now firing back up their coal plants. And what they don’t seem to understand is that you can’t just make a phone call and say turn the plant back on. They may not have coal at the plant, they may have already taken all the coal away. So we’re going to have to get that coal there. You can’t just call a train and say have it tomorrow. I don’t think FedEx will deliver coal overnight or UPS. Pick your company. And then you get all the people that don’t work there anymore. How are you going to get all those people back that run the plant? So it’s not just flipping the switch.

Otto Lynch:

And what I fear about, we’re learned some lessons from Texas and we should be learning a lot of lessons from Europe right now, and we need to have a balanced energy policy. Renewable energy is great, but we can’t just get rid of all the coal. We need to have that base load for when the wind isn’t blowing, when the sun isn’t shining or when more electric cars get put online somewhere. We’ve got to have that base load still available. We shouldn’t just be shutting down coal plants. We need to be sensitive to an environment, don’t get me wrong, but I think we need to be smart about it as well.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. And you mentioned the electric vehicle transition that’s just starting, Otto. I know you’re a big car guy, and there’s a lot of folks that will probably not drive electric car for a long time, but they’re being built now hundreds and hundreds of thousands. I mean, most of the major automakers are transitioning to almost fully electric, and that’s happening very fast, within the next three to five years. It’s not going to take much to think about millions of vehicles needing to be charged every night or during the day. Maybe speak to that as just from a capacity standpoint, what we’re seeing happening on the grid or what’s coming.

Otto Lynch:

I think we should learn from California on that this week. I’m not picking on them, I’m just saying, this is something we should learn from. So we have to all be all electric by 2035. Oh, by the way, don’t charge your cars tonight. We need to learn from that and make sure that that doesn’t happen to the whole nation and make sure that we have an overall energy policy to adapt to that. I don’t have an electric car yet. When the Enzo Vette comes out, I’m getting one of those. I can tell you that right now. You heard about the Enzo Vette?

 Zachary Oliphant:

No.

Otto Lynch:

Oh, we’re going to talk about that later. Okay. I’m not saying no, but at the same time, I drove eight hours to get here. I don’t want to stop and charge my car 45 minutes three times to get here. For long trips I don’t want to do that. But at the same time I want an Enzo Corvette, electric Corvette eventually. And so I’m not opposed to it at all. I think they’re great for short commutes and all that stuff, but I also think that, again, we need to be realistic and have a balanced policy.

Wes Oliphant:

And it just needs to be thought through. I think that’s the thing is if we’re going to have two or three million electric vehicles in the next year or two, we need to think how we’re going to build the infrastructure to support it. Because I think that’s the key to it. We have a hard enough time citing, I mean you mentioned it earlier, it takes seven to 10 years to cite a transmission line. If we start today, we’re not going to have the infrastructure in place if in the next 10 years we get a significant amount of electrical vehicles.

Otto Lynch:

We won’t have it. And we’re talking about the macro scale, the overall transmission generation grid. Let’s not forget about the micro distribution scale. A lot of new neighbors, but even new neighborhoods that were built less than five years ago, their underground distribution system was not designed for two Teslas in every garage. It can’t handle that load. So we’re going to have to basically be digging up and rewiring even neighborhoods, even new neighborhoods, just to be able to handle everybody’s charging their cars overnight.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, you guys talked to me a little bit about your committee leadership and your bios. I mean it was long with committees and subcommittees and all sorts of industry leadership. I think there’re great opportunities you guys as two icons that are helping really drive the industry forward in a lot of ways. Maybe kind of give me a little bit of your history there, Otto, maybe what you’d tell young engineers kind of related to your committee work and how that is positive for our industry.

Otto Lynch:

I like to sum it up in two quick words and then I’ll elaborate. Learn all you can learn and get in the field. You mentioned other people have mentioned that before. Be like a sponge. Whatever your opportunity is, learn from it. At Black & Veatch, I was a young engineer, but I had some mentors that are very well respected people in the industry. Some of them have passed on, but I absorbed from them. Outside of the industry even at Black & Veatch, I got to know people like Wes, and I’m not going to name other names because I’ll leave somebody out and they’ll get mad at me. But I could just go on and on and on about all the people that I’ve met. I ask questions, can I take you to lunch? Can we go to dinner tonight? And I learned from them.

Otto Lynch:

So I just say that, just learn, take opportunities such as TS DOS and ASC ETS conferences coming up next month. Go to these conferences and you’re going to learn a lot sitting in the presentations themselves, but you’re also going to learn a lot in the exhibitions and just hanging out and rubbing elbows with the people of the industry.

 Zachary Oliphant:

I think you’re right, Otto. I think that for young people, putting your phones down a little bit and connecting with other professionals in the industry, it’s so critically important. And to be able to interact, ask questions, learn from one another because everyone’s going through various challenges, and your challenge or what’s your challenge might be the same thing. You’ve solved it one way and you know can help one another. That’s something that I think we want to see more of. And we’ve all been set back a couple years with COVID where we’ve lost a lot of that interaction with folks and certainly young folks that are coming up in the industry.

Wes Oliphant:

I think we’ve built a little bit of a culture too. We don’t want to talk about things that have gone wrong, and that’s a mistake, but we need to figure out how to do that. I think that’s an opportunity for us as an industry if we would open up a little more. I’m starting to see a little bit of that, I don’t know if you’re seeing it as well, but we’re able to talk a little bit more about the problems of the industry than in the last few years.

Otto Lynch:

That’s a good point. The best way to learn is to learn from other people’s mistakes. And unfortunately sometimes in our industry, people don’t want to talk about their mistakes. They want to sweep them under a rug and pretend they didn’t happen. I understand that sometimes mistakes are embarrassing, but at the same time, if you can share your mistake, you’re going to teach hundreds of other people not to do the same thing. And I am seeing a little bit of a change at the same time because of lawsuits and embarrassment or whatever. Sometimes it’s like, don’t tell anybody, let’s get this fixed and we’ll move on.

 Zachary Oliphant:

We see it all the time, Otto, on the manufacturing side. We’ll have a utility tell us we’re the only ones having this big problem. We’re like, no, we’re not the only one because we can’t talk to anybody else about it.

Otto Lynch:

And we signed all these NDAs. We can’t talk to anybody.

 Zachary Oliphant:

The lawyers get involved and that’s fine. Like you said, they’re trying to make sure they’re protecting their interests, but the industry loses because of that. We’ve seen time and time again people just repeat the same mistake over and over and over because no one’s willing to share and discuss and put their dirty laundry out there, and everyone learned from it.

Otto Lynch:

Kind of a similar story, and Wes and I have talked about this many times before, but I’m going to go back to just engineering design, and I’m going to use wood poles as a perfect example. A lot of times people just follow a cookie book, cookie cutter standard and use a pole, and then three years later it blows down in the storm, and they don’t call the engineer and say, what did we do wrong? The linemen in the middle of the night, they do the right thing, don’t get me wrong, but they just put the line right back up. Oftentimes they put the same size pole right back up. Why didn’t we take the opportunity to maybe say, maybe we should make this line a little more robust? And then three years later the same line falls down again. Whether it be because of poor design to begin with or lack of design sometimes or maybe just a geographical, maybe it’s a wind flow area where a lot of wind comes through, but we just need to learn from that.

Otto Lynch:

I’m not picking on the wood pole, don’t get me wrong here, but with wood poles it’s a lot more easier to fix. So when you have that storm, let’s just put the wood poles back up. Let’s get everybody back on the grid. And that’s good. I mean we want to get that restoration back as quickly as possible. But maybe a restoration plan should look at it in advance and say, hey, when we lose all these poles, those class fours in that area, let’s put class threes in. Let’s take advantage of that in the future. Little bit off question topic from your question, but I wanted to get that in.

Wes Oliphant:

But it’s a good point. I’ve discussed this in the past with several folks, but we determine what we’re going to do a lot of times by what’s happened in the past. We need to be more projected forward what we think is going to happen in the future. And if we think that weather events are going to get more severe, we need to be designing for more severe weather events than what we’ve done in the past.

Otto Lynch:

Well, ASC seven and by following the 74, the new loading standard for ASC transmission, we’re going to be increasing the winds. Not to get into climate change. True or not, I’m not going to get into that. I’m saying there is an increased wind. So let’s design for the future, and we’re one of the few industries that are doing that by the way.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. Trust us. Us living in Houston, we’ve had four 500 year flood events and three 100 year flood events in a 10 year period. So certainly just using what you’ve always done is not necessarily predictive of where we’re headed and trying to get out ahead of that, especially when you’re building infrastructure that you’re trying to have out there for 30, 40, 50, 60 years, I mean, you guys have to have a real vision of where we’re going to be in 50 or 60 years. Folks expecting 115, 120 degree weather in California in September was probably not on the target list over the last 10 or 15 years of trying to predict that.

Wes Oliphant:

As Otto said, ASCE has really taken a good lead in that. The new ASCE seven has actually extended the mean recurrence interval of winds out to, I think it’s like 1700 year mean recurrence event if I remember correctly. You think about that. That’s thinking pretty forward. If you think you’re be around now, it won’t occur for 1700 years, but the statistics of it is that you’re starting to think higher and higher probability.

Otto Lynch:

And compare that with what we’ve traditionally been doing with a 50 year.

Wes Oliphant:

50 year recurrence event.

Otto Lynch:

Obviously, the 50 years not exactly working. So we need to get away from… A mentor told me this once. We need to get away from what he called the Star Trek syndrome. Too bold to go where we’ve always gone before. We can’t do that. We’ve got to break that routine. We’ve got to think new, we’ve got to come up with better designs. And it’s a two way street or two prong approach on that too. Not only do we need to have a better design, but our society as a whole is expecting electricity more and more. They expect the lights to come on.

Wes Oliphant:

To be more reliable and more relaxed.

Otto Lynch:

More reliable. If they get up in the morning and their car isn’t charged, they’re going to be hot.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Well, like you said, Otto, you think about all the remote work going on right now, electrification of transportation, all of that makes the electrical grid an even more important backbone of society. You can’t afford to have it go down. I mean, it starts shutting down the-

Wes Oliphant:

The interdependency-

 Zachary Oliphant:

… it chomps at the economy.

Wes Oliphant:

The interdependency is something I think a lot of folks underestimate. We found that out in the winter storm year event here in Texas. I think a lot of folks are starting to realize that there’s a lot more than just putting the home lights on. You’ve got gas compressor stations, you’ve got all kinds of infrastructure that depending on electricity now.

Otto Lynch:

You and I have talked about on the report card for America’s infrastructure, Wes and I are on for ASCE, it’s 17 different… I think there’s 17 different, we’re talking ports and roads and bridges and even schools is one of the categories. We can sit back and say, all of you need to have electricity to operate. You don’t have electricity, you’re not going to get your water. Your water tanks are going to empty eventually. Your wastewater plants are going to quit working, and you’re not going to like that situation. Your traffic, maybe you can drive on a road, but none of the traffic’s going to operate. And so it’s easy for us to say this, electricity is a backbone for all infrastructure.

 Zachary Oliphant:

It really is. Yeah, it really is. And there’s really not much of a dispute on that, right? Telecommunications, like you said, water, sewer, everything. I mean, everything. If you don’t have power, you don’t have anything.

Wes Oliphant:

No, I think that’s exactly right. I mean even the cell towers, they have a little bit of backup generally, but it’s not going to last more than a day or two. And so if we have a prolonged power outage, you’re going to be in deep hurt.

 Zachary Oliphant:

So, Otto, you talk a lot about young engineers, and one of the things we’re always asking all of our guests on our integrity podcast is maybe an experience in your life where either through good integrity or solid integrity, you saw some success or you saw someone do something that did not have a lot of integrity and created a big problem for them or for the industry or for a client. Maybe walk me through an example there of how you view integrity in our industry and for yourself in person.

Wes Oliphant:

It’s an important topic because us as engineers you and I have talked about it a lot, and probably why we’re such good friends, because we have a lot of viewpoints that are similar in that regard.

Otto Lynch:

I think integrity is summed up by one of the can of ethics for civil engineers, and that is don’t practice outside your area of expertise. I’m not going to go and try to size a transformer. That’s not my area of expertise. And so by the same token though, I think anybody that’s going to be designing a transmission line or a distribution line should have expertise in that area. I did my four years of internship and took my PE test and worked my butt off. Can I say that? I earned my PE and I think that I wouldn’t hire a doctor to be my doctor if he didn’t have his doctorate, and I wouldn’t hire a lawyer to represent me to be a lawyer if he didn’t pass the bar. I think that would be illegal. I may be getting in trouble for saying this, but I’m going to go ahead and say it.

Otto Lynch:

We really need to stress the importance of a PE involved in a project to make sure that engineering principles are done correctly. Many times that they even know about the codes that apply. I see that a lot. People will design and they don’t even know that there’s an ASE code that says how to design wood poles. That’s scary. So practice in your area of expertise, and then to answer your question about a specific instance, this is something that kind of rattled me for a little bit, but I see people, they buy our software and think they’re just all of a sudden a transmission line design engineer overnight. Oh, I got your software, I don’t need to know anything. I can just push F10 and get a line design out of it. And it’s not that bad.

Otto Lynch:

But what’s even worse though is management, upper management, will say, well, I’m going to hire an English major and buy them PLS CADD, and they’re going to be a lot cheaper than an engineer, and they can go design all the lines. I was actually at a very small utility, and they didn’t have anybody on staff that was qualified to be doing designs, but they wanted to buy the software. I did the presentation and everything else, and I just didn’t feel comfortable selling them the software. I was like, this is giving a Ferrari to a sick teenager, you just don’t do that.

Otto Lynch:

And I remember getting in my car and driving away, and I called my uncle, very, very wise guy, lawyer, now he’s a judge. And I just said, Uncle Gary, what’s going on here? And he told me something very wise that I have kept in my mind a lot since then. Sometimes your best clients are the ones you don’t get. And so he’s like, if they’re going to cause you a problem later, don’t worry about it. So I didn’t sell them the software, and that was out of an ethical reason.

 Zachary Oliphant:

That’s an awesome story, Otto. I’ve heard all the stories of Wes over the years and other engineers that work for us when they pull out their PE stamp to sign and seal something, I mean it means something. I mean, that thing is going to be a record, permanent record. If there’s a problem, you’re the first one getting the phone call, and it means something more than just, hey, I’ve checked a box or I’ve done something. Because you guys are putting your integrity and your education on the line every time you’re PE sealing something, and I think that certainly matters. And it shows that you’ve put in like you said the work and the testing and the effort and worked under great mentors to learn your craft so that you’re able to seal something in that regard.

Wes Oliphant:

I think that’s something that’s actually changed for the better in our industry over the last 15 or 20 or 30 years.

 Zachary Oliphant:

It is changing. Yes.

Wes Oliphant:

Because back when I first got in, utilities are exempt from doing engineering seals on things, but now you see more and more that are requiring it. So I think it’s changed for the positive, and I think that’s a good thing.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Absolutely. Well, Otto, we appreciate the time. It’s been awesome chatting with you and what you guys are doing as a business is fantastic for the industry. So we appreciate that. We appreciate your time and your insight, and it’s fun for me to get to talk to two industry icons, get to work with one, get to talk with another, makes it just fantastic for me. So thank you for your time.

Wes Oliphant:

Thank you, Zach.

 Zachary Oliphant:

Thank you, Wes.

Otto Lynch:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

 Zachary Oliphant: