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The rebuild aims to improve power reliability for the area and protect the substation in the event of a large earthquake.
The Danebo power substation, which serves 6,000 homes in the Bethel-Danebo area, is undergoing a $5 million renovation.
The upgrades aim to ensure customers will continue to receive reliable electricity. The Eugene Water & Electric Board plans to shut down and upgrade 10 major substations over the next 10 years.
“If this station were to experience an outage in its current configuration, there would be a large portion of the community (where we) could not restore power too quickly,” EWEB project manager Nathan Garrelts said. “By making the changes we’re doing here, if we experience an event, we can still back-feed everybody, that’s the main driver of this.”
The upgrade plans to not only modernize the nearly 60-year-old substation, but also implement new earthquake-resistant foundations, which will allow structures within the substation to move independently of each other during an earthquake.
“The foundations that are going in here now are seismically rated,” Garrelts said. “You can’t really do that with old equipment that’s already on pads, but for any of the new stuff you have, practice is to put in seismically rated foundations.”
Garrelts says the project will allow the substation — which is north of Royal Avenue just west of the Randy Papé Beltline — to better handle future growth in the area, too.
“Some added benefits are with a larger transformer going in here, you can have expansions in the community, things like (electric vehicles) that are coming up, or apartment buildings, duplexes and residential development,” he said.
