Cutting downtime and costs during a major utilities upgrade

A large electric utility in the US needed to perform a voltage conversion on a distribution system to bring the voltage capacity from 7,200 to 14,400 V. The line supplied power to residential, commercial, and industrial customers, meaning that many people, businesses, and organizations would be affected by the outage.

Coordinating the project was an impressive task, requiring a year of planning and involving over 200 lineworkers. The crews needed to be poised and ready to jump in and work on the upgrade as soon as the substation went offline. This project had a substantial number of moving parts where any delays or equipment failures would have a direct impact on people’s lives and businesses. In addition, thanks to our solution, all work was completed on a de-energized system which allowed the lineworkers to work safely and meet the project’s timeline.

After a competitive bidding process, the electricity utility co-op decided to work with Aggreko due to the innovative, engineering solution proposed. The Aggreko team not only had extensive experience in similar projects, but was able to do a site walk with the customer showcasing a project of similar size and scope. The proposal included a turnkey solution made up of power generation, distribution voltage transformers, and the necessary accessories for an end-to-end customer experience.

Most importantly, engineers designed a system that allowed the utility to sectionalize the unenergized work and move down the distribution system in sections. Each section was taken offline before reenergizing, instead of the alternative solution of shutting power to all customers over a 54-hour period.

With Aggreko’s designed solution, customers only faced a minimum period of power loss. On the other hand, without Aggreko’s partnership, many relying on the substation for power would have been affected for a minimum of two days, with the longest possible outage lasting 54 hours, causing a disruption to the community’s residents and businesses. With the project now complete, the utility’s voltage conversion allows for a plan to provide reliable power for future population growth.

Aggreko’s Remote Monitoring (ARM) system, working with our fuel management team, allowed our technicians to monitor real-time data and provide visibility for on-site operations to ensure that there would be no fuel-related disruptions. This was valuable to the utility, as during the monitoring of fuel use and burn rate in the first two days, Aggreko’s experts found, as a result of the generators running at the correct power output, they used less fuel, saving the utility $25,000.