Uninterrupted power during bird nest repositioning

When ospreys built their nests all along this customer’s transmission lines, they were faced with a huge problem. How to reposition the nest to protect the wildlife and ensure system reliability? In earlier parts of the year, the customer had experienced multiple short power interruptions and it looked like they would miss their System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) target.
In order to complete the work safely, they would have to de-energize and cool the lines. This would result in 2.4 million minutes of outages for their customers.

Despite the environmental sensitivity challenges and a small landing area for equipment, we were able to get three backup substations set up and ready to test within a week. These were capable of providing utility-grade power to the grid and end clients for the whole maintenance period. Our team coordinated 20 MVA at 13.8 kV utility grade power, with all the protection and controls for the grid. The setup, included 37.5 MW of generators, 13 medium voltage transformers, 2 medium voltage breakers and 10 miles of cable, brought in from all over North America within six days. Best of all, our engineers created a system that could be synchronized in and out within seconds, dramatically reducing the risk of downtime.

The utility took this operational issue and capitalized on the opportunity to complete a year’s worth of capital projects and maintenance work into 48 hours. That included moving the osprey nests on to safety, repairing the insulators on 13 towers and repairing numerous hotspots. What’s more, they did all of this without a single safety or environmental incident.