Published

2 years ago

March 21, 2024

Alice Rush

Burns & McDonnell has completed EPC and self-perform construction services for nine Wisconsin solar projects that are part of Alliant Energy’s Clean Energy Blueprint.

Burns & McDonnell started construction on these sites in 2021 with projects completed in stages.

“When you look at all that’s happened in the solar industry over the past three to four years, it’s a significant achievement to complete these projects on schedule,” says Chad Cotter, vice president of solar construction, Burns & McDonnell.

“Having our EPC team, self-perform crews, environmental and permitting specialists, and substation and interconnection support teams integrated with Alliant Energy and the local union halls early in the project was critical to achieving certainty in outcome and delivering on time. But I think most important was Alliant Energy’s bold vision to move forward with these projects despite the volatile period that paused many other projects across the country.”

Nine greenfield substations were also built during this project, with six gen-tie lines consisting of approximately eight miles of 69-kV and 138-kV transmission to get the power to the grid. To alleviate supply chain issues, the team used temporary high-voltage gas circuit breakers decommissioned from an Alliant Energy coal plant to maintain the project schedule while waiting for high-voltage gas circuit breakers to arrive.

The solar facilities span nearly 5,000 acres and collectively add 764 MW of solar capacity to Alliant Energy’s portfolio.

The post Burns & McDonnell Completes Role in Wisconsin Alliant Energy Solar Program appeared first on Solar Industry.

Burns & McDonnell Completes Role in Wisconsin Alliant Energy Solar Program

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

15 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.