Interview with Amanda Olson & Bob Hobson, Burns & McDonnell

The US power grid is facing a 3x to 6x infrastructure build-out in the next 20 years — and the expertise to deliver it is vanishing with every retirement.

At CIGRE 2024 in Paris, Ben Lanz sat down with Amanda Olson, VP of Transmission & Distribution at Burns & McDonnell, and Bob Hobson, senior expert in underground and submarine cable. The conversation covers the macro view (why US electricity demand is surging after decades of flat growth) and the deep technical view (why two cables can now carry two gigawatts into a city center with nobody noticing).

Key takeaways from this interview:

• Why US electricity demand is spiking: electrification, AI data centers, onshore manufacturing, and the ongoing replacement of 50+ year-old infrastructure
• The 3x to 6x transmission build-out: what it means for utilities, permitting, and the supply chain
• How Burns & McDonnell is mobilizing 765 kV expertise from its global offices (India, UK, Canada) to support the US transmission renaissance
• Bob Hobson’s journey from weapons systems modeling to building HVDC cable factories in Saudi Arabia — and the 660 km DC interconnector bringing Canadian hydropower to New York City
• Why HVDC technology at two gigawatts in two buried cables changes the calculus for urban power delivery
• The “gray hair drain”: why utilities are losing cable expertise faster than they can replace it
• The CIGRE earthquake story: how a US utility avoided disaster at a nuclear facility by tapping Japanese and New Zealand expertise through CIGRE connections
• Why the European underground cable market is a generation ahead of the US — and how that gap is closing

Guests: Amanda Olson (VP, Transmission & Distribution, Burns & McDonnell) and Bob Hobson (Senior Underground & Submarine Cable Expert, Burns & McDonnell).

Hosted by Ben Lanz, Executive Adviser, APC Media.