As a Lewis County Public Utility District (PUD) staff member pulled a lever, electrical pylons shifted into place and the utility's latest creation came to life.
“It’s alive!” Dr. Frankenstein would say in a theatrical rendition of the classic monster movie.
In this case, however, the new creation is not a zombie-like monster with an oddly square head. Instead, it’s a massive electric substation that promises stable power for the nearby cities of Winlock and Toledo as well as a budding industrial park nearby with land owned by major developers the Benaroya Company and EQT Exeter.
Lewis County PUD staff and officials, along with state Rep. Peter Abbarno, Winlock Mayor Victoria Marincin and many other stakeholders, gathered around the new substation Tuesday morning for an “energization ceremony.”
Before officially activating the new facility, PUD staff welcomed all of the attendees inside the fence, although still separated from most of the infrastructure for safety purposes.
PUD General Manager David Plotz welcomed attendees and thanked the many contributors, including state and federal government agencies, private investors, City of Winlock officials and staff and, finally, the PUD’s very own leadership and staff.
“The substation behind us represents the cumulation of everyone here connected to a grid built by the PUD staff, engineers and linemen who preceded us,” Plotz said. “The substation serves our neighbors today and will serve those who will come to this area and people we will not meet.”
The new facility, which was nearing completion back in November of last year, is the first phase of what will eventually be the largest substation the Lewis County PUD has ever built.
It's also the first the utility has built at all in roughly 20 years.
The facility is now operational and uses a 25-megawatt transformer to connect 69 Kilovolt (Kv) power lines to the local 12 Kv power lines.
During the ceremony, Lewis County PUD Engineering Manager Travis Kinney compared the substation to a major offramp on the electrical highway that is high voltage and long-range transmission power lines.
“Your transmission lines are like your freeway, and the substation is really your off ramps,” Kinney said. “We're coming in at a higher voltage, and then we'll drop it down to a lower voltage that goes out onto the county roads and everything else to businesses and homes.”
According to Kinney’s on-site briefing during the event, the substation fired up with eight circuits spreading out to serve the local energy load.
Of those eight circuits, four will serve nearby towns, residences, businesses and other rate payers.
The other four will go to the nearby Winlock industrial park, located along Interstate 5 and north of state Route 505. The owners of most of the land in that nearby park — Benaroya Company and EQT Exeter — are both real estate companies and both contributed significant funding to the project despite not publicizing their role in the project previously.
According to Plotz, the two real estate companies contributed a combined roughly $11 million in funding for the substation project, with their individual contributions coming in around $5.5 million each.
The substation project, as well as separate but related work to improve transmission lines to the west to serve Winlock and lines to the east to serve Toledo, is expected to cost approximately $15.6 million all told.
The costs for the project not coming from private investment came from state and federal grants.
Plotz was sure to emphasize that no PUD ratepayer funds were used to fund the facility. Grants for separate parts of the south county power grid built out from the Washington state Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Energy served as the foundation of the project with private investment needed to get it to the finish line.
The installment from the state came early in the project’s tenure around 2021 with the help of Abbarno, R-Chehalis, who had just begun his first term in office and also spoke at the event.
“For me, this was one of the first projects that I worked on and helped secure funding for in the Legislature, so it's great to see that it’s getting energized today and going to have amazing benefits for our community well into the future,” Abbarno said.
