Basin Electric’s largest substation will support membership growth

Basin Electric is committed to providing reliable electricity to its members, and this commitment means looking to the future as the membership grows. To meet the expected growth of the membership, construction of a new 19.5-acre substation is underway to replace the 345-kilovolt (kV) substation at Leland Olds Station located near Stanton, North Dakota. 

The size of the substation is directly correlated to the number of connections coming in and out. The new Leland Olds 345-kV substation will have nine terminals which includes two 345/230-kV transformers, two 345-kV reactors, and room for growth, making it one of the largest 345-kV substations Basin Electric will have. This type of investment in the bulk electric system is required to ensure the cooperative can continue to provide reliable electricity to its members.  

Initial work began on the new substation in 2020, with the first few months focused on creating a plan to keep employees and contractors safe throughout construction and commissioning of the new site. Design and engineering of the project also began in early 2020, and material procurement has been ongoing since the beginning of the project as well. Over the course of approximately two years, the Right-of-Way team obtained permitting for the site. 

Grading began in the fall of 2022 with the foundations being laid in 2023. “We installed over 700 foundations totaling about 5,000 cubic yards of concrete,” Nate Miller, Basin Electric senior electrical engineer and project coordinator, says. “This allowed us to transition into the general construction phase in November.” 

One of the biggest potential hazards onsite is working under live overhead lines, so the Transmission Systems Maintenance (TSM) team installed temporary structures at the site to raise the line clearance heights so construction crews could safely work without power line interference before grading of the site could start. 

“We’ve had TSM come out multiple times to measure distances to the overhead lines so we can determine how far away we need to stay,” Tyler Bosch, Basin Electric construction coordinator III, says. “If we aren’t able to keep our minimum approach distance, we’ll coordinate with TSM to request an outage so we can complete our tasks safely and then get the line back into service.” 

With the foundation work completed last summer, crews worked through winter, including the cold weather snap in January when temperatures dipped below freezing for over a week, erecting steel beams and trying to get as much done as they could over the winter months. “We ran with a minimum crew through the winter, but the contractor plans to ramp up to around 15 to 20 contractors on site when we hit peak construction this summer,” Miller says. 

Once the steel has been put up and the frost is gone, crews will transition into digging in the underground conduit and grounding. Next steps include moving the transmission lines from one substation to the other. “We are hoping to start cutting over the lines this fall at which point the substation will be energized and operational,” Bosch says. Due to the nature of the substation, both the existing and new substation will be energized during the cutover process. 

Read more about the new substation at Leland Olds Station in Basin Electric’s largest substation built to support membership growth in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Basin Today.