Location: St. Clair County, Illinois
Client: Scott Air Force Base

Today’s electrical substation infrastructure climate is an ever-changing system of more than just replacing old with new. With the need for energy demands increasing, newer technologies play an important role in infrastructure upgrade construction projects.

THE PROJECT
Scott Air Force Base is in the long-term process of phasing out lower voltage substations while simultaneously adding to or building new substations and increasing additional loads for present and future needs. In essence the project entailed adding on to the existing Substation 3 prior to decommissioning. Substation 3A, which was feeding one section of base operations with a 5000v capacity, and delivering an expanded Substation 3 to carry an upgraded load - up to 7500KVA.

OUR APPROACH
With only a 6 month construction schedule. clean, precise project management would be of paramount importance on this project. In fact, three months of project planning and preconstruction would be necessary to ensure success of the project. With long lead times for equipment delivery, it was critical in the preconstruction & planning phase of the project to determine sequencing of outages. In total, 12 outages had to occur at varying times, three of those being for the Substation 3, with the remaining outages directly affecting power to buildings fed from Substation 3. To accomplish this it was necessary to plan for 2nd or 3rd shift start times for the removal, replacement and testing to cutover to new systems within the expanded substation. Additionally, 30 days advance notice was required for ALL power outages. This required constant communication between all parties.

OUR WORK
The new substation began with Guarantee Electrical providing all of the site civil work, including installing 1500 feet of new duct banks and 10,000 feet of high voltage cable and 150 high voltage terminations. This was no small feat considering much of the work had to occur during the very cold winter months with a project duration of only 6 months. Once the site civil work was completed, GECO began sequencing taking 10 transformers out of service and installing 10 new transformers on a one-for-one basis.

In addition to the high voltage and site civil, GECO installed:

• One 1500KVA pad mount transformer
• One 1000KVA pad mount transformer
• Two 500 KVA pad mount transformers
• One 300KVA pad mount transformer
• One 112.5KVA pad mount transformer
• Three single phase transformers
• Nine new 15kv pad mounted transfer switches