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Four-year Construction Work Plan, Long Range Engineering Plan Approved

During the March meeting, the East River Board took action to approve a new 4-year Construction Work Plan and Long-Range Engineering Plan to meet future reliability and growth requirements to member systems.

The Long-Range Engineering Plan covers the period of 2010 through 2025 and supports the Construction Work Plan and future Rural Utilities Service and other lenders’ loan application requirements. To develop the Long Range Engineering Plan, East River Engineering Services performed an in-depth electrical system engineering study. Computer modeling was used to simulate the effect of outages, switching and load growth to identify system additions and improvements which will need to be done to eliminate overloaded lines and equipment, voltage problems, operational constraints and reliability problems.

The proposed Construction Work Plan for the years 2011-2014 total $67.2 million in new projects and $23.6 million in carryover projects from the 2008-2010 Construction Work Plan.  The Work Plan calls for approximately $25.4 million in projects for 2011, $25.8 million for 2012, 18.3 million for 2013 and $21.3 million in 2014.

The plan includes major system additions project to handle load growth and system additions totaling $38.3 million. These include seven new distribution substations, one new high-voltage substation and constructing 108 miles of new transmission lines.

The System Replacement Initiative (SRI) comprises $36.4 million of the total amount. This initiative, started this year, has been established to address the aging of East River’s transmission system by rebuilding some of the oldest portions of system.

$9.5 million has been dedicated toward on-going system replacement and repairs of East River’s transmission lines, substations, telecommunications, and load management equipment. $3 million is budgeted for technology integration, $930,000 is proposed for power quality and reliability improvements, and $2.7 million is committed to complete the Headquarters Building remodel.