By Ben Antonius | Daily Republic | March 03, 2008
The PG&E substation at Union Avenue and Ohio Street will be getting equipment upgrades over the next two weeks. Photo by Brad Zweerink
FAIRFIELD - To keep pace with a booming population, PG&E plans to launch an overhaul of its Fairfield substation today.
The three-month, $2.9 million project is part of a larger effort to improve the company's infrastructure statewide, PG&E officials said.
'As our communities grow, we constantly grow,' PG&E spokeswoman Jennifer Ramp said.
The project is expected to be completed by the beginning of June and will likely involve occasional outages for residents in certain areas. The outages will be planned and announced in advance, but no plans were available Monday.
The project itself will involve replacing approximately 750 feet of underground high-voltage cable exiting the substation at Broadway and Ohio streets and crossing under Union Street to Jefferson Street.
The company will also be replacing the transformer bank at the facility. The new giant transformer bank will be delivered to the substation March 17, at which point outages are likely.
The additional capacity is necessary to meet the continued increase of electrical demand in the area, especially during the hot summer months when electric consumption is at its highest, the company stated.
The new equipment will provide an additional 13.4 megawatts of capacity, enough to serve 2,680 residential customers in the Fairfield area.
Ramp said the company typically projects what its capacity needs will be 10 years in advance.
'This project was approved a few years ago and construction's now getting started,' she said.
The Fairfield project is one part of an approximately $2.8 billion effort by PG&E to improve the reliability and capacity of its infrastructure across Northern California, Ramp said.
Reach Ben Antonius at 427-6977 or bantonius@dailyrepublic.net.
