SIUSLAW NEWS ❚ WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2017
Upgrade
from 1A
With this model, relay sys-
tems are able to track if the
power goes out and isolate the
line. Customers will see a
blink in the lights, but there
should not be an outage.
This is partially why
CLPUD was able to restore
power to nearly 4,000 cus-
tomers relatively quickly dur-
ing a storm on April 7.
Relays sense the current and
voltage and send an alert to
CLPUD operators.
“Those alerts go to the oper-
ators’ cell phones so they can
respond,” Grove said. “We
have crews that come out of
the Florence office. If it’s a
substation problem that our
local servicemen can’t handle,
they come out of South
Beach.”
Shamus
Gamache,
CLPUD’s electrical engineer-
ing supervisor, said, “We have
better reliability because we
¡FELIZ!
put in this new transmission
system and also added capaci-
ty by finishing Kingwood and
having it all connected.”
CLPUD transferred Heceta
Beach Substation’s customer
load to Kingwood once the
substation was completed.
According to Chandler,
Heceta
Beach
required
upgrades to match the rest of
the system’s capacity. These
included new breakers and
feeds to the other two stations.
Heceta Beach’s upgrades
were especially important
since the substation carries a
third of the 11,000 customers
in the Florence and Dunes City
area. Once, in winter 2013, the
station reached 99 percent
capacity.
“We pride ourselves that
people never lost service,”
Chandler said.
The third component of the
$6 million project was replac-
ing 2.4 miles of transmission
line on Highway 101 from
north of Heceta Beach to 27th
Street.
“On the transmission line
from the highway, we collabo-
rated and brought in crews
from South Beach to fortify
the Florence crew. We worked
together, probably more than
we ever had, besides storms.
And the Reedsport crew came
up and took care of the cus-
tomer work up here so we
could free up the Florence
crew to concentrate on this
project,” Grove said.
A flagging company from
Coos Bay directed traffic.
Chandler noted that some of
the older utility poles remain
alongside CLPUD’s new ones.
These will be decommissioned
after CLPUD’s telecommuni-
cations partners switch their
lines to the newer poles.
Throughout the project,
CLPUD was able to use its
own crews for most of the
work.
Chandler said, “The nice
thing about this is that it was
company built and we didn’t
have to outsource service to
anyone.”
“There were a lot of line-
men, journeyman craftsmen,
wiremen, communications,
shop, meter relay men and the
engineers in house who
designed everything and built
the panels, tested all the relay
and made sure everything
works properly. All right here
in our service territory,”
7 A
Gamache said. “It’s been a
great project and a pleasure to
be part of. It’s good to see that
it’s completed and I’ll be able
to close the SR work order
number.”
CLPUD projects that the
Florence-area Electric System
Upgrade will meet the growth
and reliability of needs of cus-
tomers for the next 20 years.
This includes the trend for
cannabis growers now that the
product is legal.
“Marijuana farms can use a
lot of our electricity load,”
Chandler said. “They are per-
fectly legal in Oregon, we just
need to know. We ask that peo-
ple tell their local electricity
provider before they start
plugging into the grid, or they
could blow a transformer. That
makes us very grumpy, and we
would charge you for that.”
Although CLPUD will now
focus on other projects outside
the Florence area, it has plans
to remodel its Florence facility
into a Southern Operations
Facility soon.
Central Lincoln PUD can be
reached in Florence at 966
Highway 101, by calling 541-
997-3414 and by going to
clpud.org.
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