Puget Sound Energy is building a new facility near Maxwelton Road that officials say should help keep the lights on when the wind blows.
The utility is constructing a 25-megavolt amperes substation off Highway 525, between Coles and Maxwelton roads. It’s also upgrading and replacing transmission and distribution lines around Langley. Combined, the improvements are expected to improve reliability for customers.
“That should decrease the outages and increase the reliability to the South End of the island, Greenbank, and Langley area,” said Jim Kearnes, project manager.
The $10 million project, which began in 2010, should wrap up in February or March and be fully operational by winter 2016.
The Maxwelton substation will separate three transmission lines, two coming from North Whidbey and one from Langley, and route them to a single bus with circuit breakers. If a power outage or fault were to occur in one of the transmission lines, the line will be tripped while the others will stay in service.
Because there is only one substation on Brooks Hill Road to serve all of Langley, it often can’t handle the workload when power outages occur. The Maxwelton substation will effectively act as a second power conduit for residents in the area, Kearnes said.
Whidbey Island receives all of its power from Sedro-Woolley, via lines that span Deception Pass. The substation will take the 115,000 volts coming from transmission lines and reduce it to 12,500 volts, from which point the power will then be fed to the rest of the area.
“It stuffs it down from high voltage to usable voltage,” said Tom Kerfonta, civil construction manager of the project.
The project has been in the works for five years, but construction and major clearing didn’t begin until July. Kearnes said Puget Sound Energy has been making small improvements to sustain and improve reliability on the island, but the substation is the most significant to date.
“This is kind of the last piece of the puzzle,” Kearnes said. “It’s the most ambitious and has taken the longest to implement.”
The site prep and civil work for the project will wrap up this week. Puget Sound Energy will spend the early months of 2016 installing the electrical equipment while also bringing transmission lines onto the property. Kearnes said existing transmission lines will be rerouted and no new lines will be built.
A number of transmission line projects by Puget Sound Energy in conjunction with the substation include extending a fiber optic cable from the Brooks Hill substation to the Maxwelton substation using existing poles by late 2015; upgrading an existing single-phase transmission line to a three-phase line along Maxwelton Road, south from Craw Road and extending onto French Road by mid-2016; and replacing aging wood poles on Craw, Maxwelton, and Midvale roads and eastbound on Highway 525. The wood poles of an existing transmission line from the Maxwelton substation will also be replaced by late 2016.
Puget Sound Energy already has other improvements underway, such as pole replacements, changing the alignment of transmission lines north of the Maxwelton substation to clear them away from trees, and clearing out land to provide more electrical clearance island-wide.
The extension of the fiber optic cable is expected to be a more reliable power feed from the Maxwelton substation to Brooks Hill.
Kearnes said the community will receive the most positive impacts of the project when the upgrade from a single-phase transmission line to a three-phase line occurs in March or April of 2016.
“There are large benefits that accrue to the community at that point,” Kearnes said.
Of the 33 acres of property that Puget Sound Energy owns for the project, 20 acres will be dedicated as green space and preserved in its natural state, Kearnes said. He also added that there will no additional clearing of the forest surrounding the land.
