The construction industry is beginning to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. After seeing project starts and bidding activity drop significantly in 2020, Autodesk’s 2021 Construction Outlook report sees a positive near-term future. New starts, project restarts, and starting backlogs are rising in all sectors; residential, commercial, and non-building infrastructure.
We’ve been telling solar operators how the Snake Tray Solar Snake Max XL™ system saves money on materials and labor while increasing daily energy harvest by up to 30-watt hours per meter over traditional trenching and bundling cable methods, and now we have the numbers to back it up.
It’s a simple truth: Projects that are better designed in the beginning have better outcomes in the end. The reason is less changes on the job site. Fewer change orders mean lower costs through proper material estimating, less surprise charges, reduced overtime expenses, and fewer delays, allowing contractors to hit construction windows for timely project completion. The result is more profitable projects and happier clients.
The U.S. economy is picking up steam, eclipsing quarterly GDP growth forecasts as America gets back to work after a difficult 2020. The construction industry is seeing upticks in activity for new project starts, resuming construction at paused sites, and rescheduling projects that were put on hold during the pandemic.
There’s light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel; employees are slowly returning to the office after a year or more of working remotely. While the pandemic has permanently altered the workplace, that doesn’t mean it cannot be reinvented to be even better than before.
Most utility-grade solar plants with hundreds of arrays and thousands of panels are designed in east/west rows to easily follow the path of the sun. From high above, everything appears neat and square. But there’s more to cabling a solar plant than managing the north/south “home run” pathways that carry DC power from the ends of each row to the interconnection point for conversion to AC power.
Our insatiable demand for electricity is forcing utilities and energy providers to build new sources of power. Advances in solar technology combined with falling costs and a push by the federal government for renewable energy has made solar power more popular than ever. Unfortunately, many of the prime locations for high mega-watt solar farms are either gone, too expensive, or not in proximity to growing population centers.
Back in the summer of 1996, we started our business from a Saturday morning idea to make a better cable tray that workers could bend by hand to make installations cheaper and easier. Today, Snake Tray is a company that serves major corporations and government agencies worldwide through industry-leading cable management, power distribution, and enclosure solutions.
Quite frankly, we’re surprised (and thankful) that no one else thought of it first. Prefabricated cable management systems deliver unmatched value versus generic wire basket trays by speeding installation, improving consistency, and maximizing savings through reducing labor at the job site. Snake Tray invented the concept of prefabricated cable management systems 25 years ago and has been innovating ever since.
Data centers, especially hyperscale data centers, are power-hungry monsters with an insatiable appetite for electricity. In fact, after buying the land, constructing the building, installing all the racks and servers, and staffing it, the number one operating expense for any data center is utility power. Their carbon footprint is as big, if not bigger, than many manufacturing operations.
