National Grid promises stronger service to areaDate: 12/11/2014 GREATER?SPRINGFIELD – National Grid hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Dec. 4 to commemorate completion of the West Hampden substation in Hampden, part of the Hampden County Reliability Project, designed to create a stronger transmission grid for the region.
“We made a pledge to help the communities of the Pioneer Valley recover from a series of devastating storms several years ago and we’re proud that some of our biggest projects are coming to fruition,” Marcy Reed, president of National Grid in Massachusetts, said.
The project has been completed after two years of work, according to National Grid. Hampden’s substation more securely connects National Grid’s roughly 6,500 customers in communities such as East Longmeadow, Hampden, Monson, Palmer, and Wilbraham to the larger Massachusetts power grid.
Two ongoing projects include completely rebuilding East Longmeadow’s #508 substation, anticipated to be completed in October 2015, as well as upgrading a 10-mile transmission line that runs through Palmer, Monson, and Hampden, which is scheduled to be completed in a year and a half, Stephen Katinas, manager of National Grids North Eastern substations, said.
Katinas said the West Hampden substation, a 40-foot long facility, was built on a new location and includes a 69 kilovolt (kV) highline and two 115 kV highlines.
The electricity from the highlines is sent to a transformer, which reduces the electrical output to 13, 8 kV and is sent to the lines and steps down to another transformer that is fed to customers, he explained.
“Resilient strong electric networks are very important to our customer,” Reedy said. “Being able to retain their power and basically use the commodity that is so valuable to their daily lives and so with that in mind we undertook a very large infrastructure project.”
Reedy said the substations are intended to provide backup bulk power to the area.
“It will not help when a tree limb falls in front of your house on Tinkham Road,” she explained. “What this does is it upgrades the entire bulk power system into the region and will allow us to move our customers from one line to another, basically provide redundancy into the area.”
State Sen. Gale Candaras, who was a proponent for the Pioneer Valley National Grid infrastructure projects, said state legislators are trying to find ways to create incentives for power companies to invest in their infrastructure, which sometimes costs millions of dollars.
“And of course, [there’s] a rate paying public that simply cannot afford to pay anymore in rates and so there’s a gap there and we have to find innovative ways to deal with the energy infrastructure,” she added.
Candaras said the project was finished quickly compared to other projects that go through the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board. However, in her opinion, the board took too long to approve the project.
“We try to partner with local legislators to have them support us, whether it’s in permitting processes [and] energy policy on the state level,” Reedy added.
At the East Longmeadow substation, a substation transformer will be replaced and a feeder position will be added out of the facility, Substation Supervisor Roger Coutre said.
“It will basically be almost all new equipment out of there,” he added. “We will be replacing substation breakers, which are the protective device for the lines that we see going out here.”
The 10 miles of transmission line would also see improvements such as new steel structures and primary high voltage conductors, Coutre said.
East Longmeadow Board of Selectmen Chair Paul Federici said the 2011 tornado didn’t affect East Longmeadow as much as other communities such as Wilbraham but the town did lose power during the Oct. 30, 2011 snowstorm.
“At that time, there were some major power lines that were in effect severed between the Springfield area and East Longmeadow,” he added. “And because of this, [National Grid] lost all ability to transfer power to East Longmeadow.
“Basically, if an occurrence like this should happen again then this will sort of circumvent it,” he continued. “There’s an alternate route to send the power to get it down to East Longmeadow and Wilbraham so they’re not stuck with a one-line system.”
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