The Eugene Water and Electric Board has been rebuilding its largest wholly owned substation for more than a year to increase the amount of power it can serve, upgrade the facility’s seismic resiliency and improve reliability.
The updates to the “Grand Central Station” of EWEB’s electric distribution system cost $16.1 million. The project will be the first completed in a series of system updates for EWEB targeting the modernization of the region’s electrical grid.
Construction began in November 2022 by taking the substation offline. If testing protocols are completed according to plan, the substation is set for electrification in October. The Currin Substation will be the first project completed in EWEB's work toward rebuilding 10 substations in 10 years.
Philip Peterson, an EWEB engineer, said the process of planning and executing the Currin Substation rebuild has been nearly two decades in the making. He said most substations have a 50-year lifespan but that the Currin Substation had just crested 60 years of age when the rebuild began.
“I’ve been at EWEB for 17 years and I’ve loved my time here but we’ve been talking about this project that entire time,” Peterson said. “It was always that juggernaut that we couldn’t get off the ground.”
A project that once felt like a distant dream is now nearing completion, with 40-foot metal towers and feet upon feet of transmission lines occupying the almost two-acre facility plot. Peterson said seismically upgrading the substation was a major part of the project. One way the substation has been made more seismically sound was with the installation of foundations that are six feet wide and 31 feet deep. Standing on those foundations are 40-foot-tall structures connected with up to three transmission lines that can pull with a ton of force each.
“A Cascadia event has not happened in our lifetime but someday will and so we want to make sure that Currin can survive that,” Peterson said.
“We’re talking a lot of forces, a lot of stuff that can experience a shaking event, so we take the proper precautions to protect against that. … We don’t try to make things stop moving during an earthquake. We just try to not make them fight each other.”
The Currin Substation is considered the “Grand Central Station” of EWEB’s electrical system. Peterson said this is because the substation gets a large amount of power from the north and the south while transmitting a large load of energy to the west, where Eugene’s downtown core is, and a critical load of energy to the east.
Another major component of the rebuild was to ensure that EWEB customers don’t experience power losses when maintenance work is necessary or other circumstances arise.
“We’re very fortunate in Eugene that most customers, I’m talking 90% plus of our customers, can be fed from multiple substations,” Peterson said.
“Taking one off should never mean a customer doesn’t have power unless other things have gone wrong and even if we do have that next thing go wrong, that’s why we do the studies so we have the plans ready to employ if we need to.”
Once the Currin Substation is electrified, EWEB is set to concentrate its efforts on rebuilding substations in west Eugene. Peterson said the project has been a long time in the making and that seeing progress toward these goals is a positive.
“It’s happening and that’s really a seriously good thing,” Peterson said. “To see these projects happen, get off the ground, get constructed and in service is really satisfying and really what I want to see happen.”
Hannarose McGuinness is The Register-Guard’s growth and development reporter. Contact her at hmcguinness@registerguard.com
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: With energy demands rising, EWEB nears completion of $16M station overhaul
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