This 230/34.5kV collector substation for a renewable developer connected a 193-megawatt solar park to the power grid, the largest solar farm in Washington state at the time of completion.

Factory-Built Solution

This project used Agile by Beta®, Beta Engineering’s turnkey Factory-Built Substation service offering that leverages modules prebuilt in a factory to reduce construction time in the field and improve schedule certainty. Using FBS helps power providers avoid weather delays in the field, and FBS installs can take as little as a few hours, as opposed to weeks of field construction.

Integrated Design Cost Savings

Beta leveraged an integrated design “4D” model (3D model combined with the project schedule) to provide visibility into the project’s design and schedule. The model helped the team identify a site condition early in design that would have required a costly drainage path workaround. Instead, the team redesigned the substation and ultimately reduced the site footprint, avoiding the site constraint and reducing land costs.

Vertical Bus Design Solution

The engineering team’s solution to reduce the site’s footprint and avoid the site constraint involved redesigning a portion of the 230kV bus in a vertical arrangement on a double-H frame.

Video: Watch the substation come together, piece by piece

Beta helped this renewable developer client achieve a safe and successful interconnection. The customer’s safety manager commended the team on the project for its “outstanding safety record,” with no recordable incidents or lost time.