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Where outstanding project management meets deep industry expertise, Sargent Electric( Sargent) is revolutionizing the electrical contracting sphere across the United States. With a legacy spanning over a century, the company has evolved and grown with the rise of the electrical sector and, today, it leads at the fore as the‘ go-to’ partner for business owners, contractors and developers across a wide multitude of industries. The Sargent story started in 1907 when the company was founded by the Sargent family in Pittsburgh, primarily working within the steel industry. Over the course of the next five decades, the business grew steadily and soon, following its longevity and success, it broadened its horizons to East Chicago in 1959. As the steel industry advanced and new target markets emerged, Sargent continued its expansion across the United States, opening offices in Maine, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and another in Pennsylvania.
In 2020, Russ Timmers, Vice President at Sargent, was brought on board to set up the company’ s Wisconsin location. The division made inroads into the industrial and commercial markets before securing its first utility-scale solar project in 2021. Since then, the Wisconsin office has gained precedence as the company’ s leader in solar projects, with almost all of Sargent’ s utility-scale solar projects run out of that location. Now, with the demand for renewable energy rapidly increasing, Sargent’ s utility solar division is booming, and the company as a whole continues to be recognized for its dedication to project
▶ Russ Timmers, Vice President- Great Lakes Region management excellence, skillful workmanship and professionalism. As the Founder of Sargent’ s solar group, Russ Timmers recently sat down with Energy, Oil & Gas to discuss the company’ s renewable operations and what the future might hold as the division continues to flourish. He starts by sharing insight into a recent significant solar project by Sargent – the construction of a major solar field in Illinois.
“ We recently completed a significant solar project in Springfield, Illinois. It was 600 megawatts A / C covering six square miles and it’ s the largest solar field East of the Mississippi and the fifth largest in the United States,” Russ begins.“ As part of that project, we connected 1,600,564 solar modules, installed 955,000 feet of 35,000-volt cable, 1,005,876 feet of DC feeder wire, and 27,365,000 feet of string wire. It took us two years and 428,500 man hours to complete the project, and we did so without a lost time or recordable injury, which is pretty notable. This summer, we’ ll be kicking off four new similar solar projects: one in Michigan, one in Kansas and two in Ohio.”
With its capabilities spanning across a wide multitude of industries – including industrial, commercial, infrastructure, telecommunications, and more – Sargent’ s impressive portfolio boasts a vast variety of different projects. Renewable energy, in particular, is a growing market for the business, opening a plethora of opportunities for Sargent alongside its electrical projects.
“ Here in the upper Midwest, there’ s a lot of mega dairy farms, so renewable energy and biogas facilities are becoming big businesses for us right now. We’ ve built six of them so far and formed relationships with those developers, helping them to develop better processes and procedures for long term facilities.
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