Due to increasing power demand from community and business growth, a California electric utility needed to upgrade and expand an existing substation from 69/12kV to 230/69/12kV. The utility could not afford to take the existing station offline during construction and needed to minimize outages to the nearby residential neighborhood and local businesses.

Beta Engineering provided the turnkey expertise the utility needed for this challenging brownfield substation project. The project required careful construction sequencing to minimize outage time. Beta achieved this by constructing a new 69/12kV substation on an adjacent site and then cut power over from the old 69kV substation. Beta then demolished the old 69kV substation and constructed a new 230kV station in its place.

This award-winning substation expansion project helped increase system flexibility, improve reliability in the region, and provide additional capacity for forecasted power demand in the area. Other benefits included fire-hardening upgrades like replacing wooden poles with steel poles for overhead lines, new grid capacity to connect renewable resources in the region, and more efficient power distribution.