New substation will meet Basin Electric’s growing membership needs

Basin Electric is committed to providing reliable electricity to its members, and this commitment means looking to the future as the membership grows. 

As part of the Aging Substation Infrastructure Replacement Initiative, construction is underway at the Leland Olds Station substation, a 345-kilovolt (kV) substation located near Stanton, North Dakota. The new substation will include nine terminals, which will make it the one of the largest 345-kV substations Basin Electric will have, ensuring continued reliability for its members. 

Initial work for the new 11-acre substation began in 2020, with the first three to four months focused on a plan to keep employees safe throughout the 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 and the Transmission System Maintenance team installed some temporary structures at the site to raise the line clearance heights so that the construction crews could safely work on the site without power line interferences before the grading of the site could start.

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,” said Nate Miller, Basin Electric senior electrical engineer. “This allowed us to transition into the general construction phase in November.” 

Crews are actively working, even in recent cold weather conditions, to get as much done as they can over the winter. “We are currently running 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 the peak construction this summer,” Miller said. Tyler Bosch, Basin Electric construction coordinator III, is on site and oversees the contractors. 

Next steps include moving the transmission lines from one substation to the other. “The plan is to cut over the existing transmission lines from the existing substation to the new one this fall,” Miller said. “This ‘cutover’ will happen in phases over the course of a year.” Due to the nature of the substation, the existing and new substation will be energized during the cutover process. 

The site is expected to be fully operational by the summer of 2025.