The Chatter 2021

Commitment Key to Substation Expansion Project

By Cam Rand

Cianbro has completed the final commissioning phase of a substation expansion project in central Maine. This past fall, the team continued to work through engineering changes with the client to ensure that the team would cross the finish line in early October 2021 with the re-energization of the existing and expanded 115/34.5kV substation.

Cianbro’s Power & Energy team began this project in the late summer of 2020 breaking ground on the substation expansion pad with our subcontract partner Comprehensive Land Technologies, Inc. With the delayed award of the project, and concurrent temporary design of the existing transmission and distribution yard bypass configurations, it became critical for Cianbro to complete the new 115/34.5kV T3 transformer expansion for system critical reliability purposes.

Cianbro’s substation teams, alongside local distribution line crews, worked diligently through the 2020-2021 winter season to complete the temporary bypass work and yard expansion. As the project neared the energization of the yard expansion, the team was thrown another curve ball with