PUD ‘intertie’ aims for better reliability

Published 4:20 am Wednesday, September 7, 2016

LONG BEACH — When the power goes out, Northwest residents know having a personal backup generator is often the only way to get the lights back on in a hurry.

Pacific and Wahkiakum counties will share their own version of a backup generator when an “intertie” of the two Public Utility Districts is completed sometime next summer. Work is now underway on a $400,000 upgrade.

“This is only going to improve our reliability for both of our systems,” said Pacific County PUD General Manager Doug Miller.

The intertie will connect a substation on the Pacific County side with the Grays River substation on the Wahkiakum side. The connection will allow either county to take their respective substation offline for maintenance or repair, while still keeping the lights on for paying customers.

Miller said just about every other year the Naselle substation has to schedule an outage to clean insulators. That is maintenance “you can’t do when it’s hot,” he said. Now those customers won’t be without.

But also, in case of a storm outage, the “redundancy” in the system means either county will have access to power. An outage, say for example in the Naselle area, said Miller, would mean the Grays River substation would supply, not all, but most of the affected homes almost immediately with power.

“By having this opportunity from Wahkiakum County, we’ll be able to pick up a lot more coverage,” Miller said.

An outage that might last days, would be reduced to hours or minutes with the intertie, he added.

Miller said both counties have signed agreements to move ahead with the intertie and both are actively purchasing the equipment and finalizing the design and construction plans needed to complete the project.

The crux of the agreement is for each county to build its own transmission lines to a “meet me” point near the county line.

Miller said Pacific County needs to install about a mile of underground pipe for the transmission cable to reach the county line. The county has purchased regulators, and will install those and begin some construction this fall.

Currently, Miller reported that Wahkiakum County is busy designing their three-mile line and are also responsible for purchasing the switch gear that allows the counties to share electricity.

Pacific County still needs to get approval from the state because the line will run along a state highway. That permitting is still in the works, Miller said.

He expects to have everything working by next spring or summer.

Construction costs of the project will be covered in three different ways in Pacific County, said Miller. Reserves provided by long-term bonds pay for larger projects like the specific intertie components, he said. Line extensions and line improvements come out of revenue from sales. Half the cost of equipment needed for the entire project, is then picked up by Wahkiakum, “because it really benefits both of us,” Miller said.

He said metering will work much as it always has, whether one is purchasing from their own PUD, or the neighboring county’s.

Dave Tramblie is the general manager of Wahkiakum County PUD. He said right now, the one source of electrical feed available for all of the west half of the county comes from the Grays River substation.

“In the past, if we’d have to perform maintenance on the transformer we’d have to shut all our customers down,” he said. That’s about 600 customers.

Not anymore.

Mirroring his counterpart on the other side of the county line, Tramblie said, “The big picture for us is, it’s really all about reliability.”

That reliability of service the intertie will provide has both short term and long term benefits, he said.

Today, in the event of a catastrophic outage or failing transformer, customers would likely be in the dark for three to five days. With the intertie, that time would be reduced to hours, or less.

In the long term, Tramblie said the transformer will need to be replaced and customers that would normally be disconnected from the Grays River substation, will now have another option. And replacing the transformer is not a question of if, but when, he said.

“The equipment is 50-plus years old,” Tramblie said. “Just like your old car wears out, old transformers wear out.”

At some point, the entire substation may also need to be rebuilt, and that could take upwards of six months. A back up in that scenario is absolutely necessary. Wahkiakum considered connecting its own two systems, now separate, but connecting to Pacific County was actually closer, meaning construction and associated costs will be fewer.

Tramblie said both counties get their power from the Bonneville Power Administration, and he believes an intertie such as the one proposed is not that unusual. He said Wahkiakum County has secured all the necessary permits and has already laid 3,200 feet of underground conductor.

“So we’re moving forward,” Tramblie said.

He said Wahkiakum is funding their part of the intertie project through current consumer rates and the county is not taking out any loans. He said consumers won’t see any rate increase because of the project.

Bigger projects, on the other hand, could affect what people pay.

“As we look at rebuilding the substation, rate impacts or loans will be discussed,” Tramblie said.