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Advanced technology brings Western, Natives together

Composite conductor is linking DSW customers—including a Native American tribe and a California municipality—to the promise of greater reliability and economical power supplies. 
 
On May 5, Western helped dedicate a new 69-kV line along the California/Arizona border that uses this innovative technology to increase reliability for the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and the City of Needles, Calif.  Western provided the funding and project management to interconnect the new line to our system at the new Firehouse Substation, as well as environmental compliance. The four-mile Firehouse-Topock line to the Tribe’s No Name Substation not only connects the city and the tribe to additional power and transmission resources, but it was designed to carry additional capacity when the area’s population grows.  

“This is one of the most important and exciting projects we’ve seen here in many years,” said Robert Walker, utility manager for Needles. “It will end our power constraint and open up a world of possibility in terms of economic development.”

The new technology could also open up new possibilities for solving regional transmission constraints.  That’s the hope of California Congressman Jerry Lewis and Arizona Congressmen Trent Franks and Ed Pastor, who earmarked $12 million to Western to manage this new line’s construction and interconnection, as well as to re-conductor the Davis-Topock 230-kV line with the composite conductor in 2007. 

An aging problem

DSW Project Manager Todd Rhoades explained the city’s need for a new line.  “The City of Needles was a transmission service customer of Nevada Power, and the lines they were being served on were constructed in the 1940s or 1950s.  The city was experiencing problems because of the age and capacity limitations of the line,” he explained, referring to the frequent power outages every summer.

“Because we run up to 120 to 130 degrees every day, our load in the summertime is literally four times what it is in the winter,” said Needles Electric Line Crew Supervisor Jack Lindley. 

The benefit of using the composite conductor, or Aluminum Conductor Composite Reinforced, is that the new line can carry additional current even in the extreme heat—an important feature when considering future electrical loads.  

“As the city grows, that capacity is now available to them,” said Rhoades. 

Lindley anticipates that growth right around the corner. “While construction has slowed around here, there are still some major resorts on the horizon.  We now serve 3,000 customers, but I anticipated serving 5-6,000 customers in the next five years.  These new luxury homes going up have multiple air conditioning units.” 

Reaching out to a wider audience

Another advantage of the new line is that the city will now be serviced by Western. “Their contract with Nevada Power had provisions for them to purchase power from Nevada Power only, where Western will allow them to go to the open market and essentially contract with anyone for power.  While we provide a certain amount of hydropower to them, they contract with other providers for additional power requirements for the city,” Rhoades said. 

Lindley said, “Construction of the new line improves our circuit reliability because the system was antiquated. We were only able to purchase power from one supplier.  Now we have access to the grid, which gives us 24 power suppliers to choose from.” 

In addition, now that Needles is physically interconnected to Western, all of its   transmission and balancing authority services are taken care of by Western instead of by different contractors. “I expect this new line to reduce our operating costs 12 to 15 percent,” Lindley said. 

Groundbreaking new technology

The new line benefits the tribe as well.  Fort Mojave’s utility, the Aha Macav Power Services, can tap into the line’s additional capacity to serve the future power needs of the reservation, which covers 22,820 acres in three states along the Colorado River.  AMPS gets about 20 percent of its power from Western.

“The benefits for the conductor are lower line losses and increased load-serving capacity, compared to an equivalent conductor,” said Bill Cyr, general manager of AMPS.  “The unique arrangement we have to share transmission capacity should allow the tribe access to future loads on the California side of reservation.” 

AMPS is the first Tribal entity to install the new composite conductor material. “We’re very pleased to be the first tribal power company to apply this technological advance in electricity transmission,” said Cyr in a news release.  “It exemplifies the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe’s eagerness to work with surrounding communities and government agencies to enhance the quality of life and opportunities for mutual growth.”

Innovative material getting wide use

Besides addressing a local utility’s future transmission needs, composite conductor has the potential to meet the future transmission needs of the region and the nation. 

As power demands grow across the Southwest, composite conductor can be a more economically and environmentally friendly choice to meet those increased loads, say utility planners.  Instead of building new towers or stringing new line, composite conductor can increase the existing line’s capacity without compromising safety or reliability. That’s just what Western determined after field testing the new technology on the Jamestown-Fargo 230-kV line in North Dakota in 2002 and in 2004 on the Liberty-Parker 230-kV line in Arizona in extreme temperatures. 

Encouraging results from those tests led Western to install composite conductor on the Topock-Davis-Lake Mead 230-kV line in 2007.  This 80-mile line parallels the Colorado River along Arizona’s western border with California and extends to Boulder Dam.  Besides Western and AMPS, five other major U.S. utilities are using or installing the Aluminum Conductor Composite Reinforced material, including Arizona Public Service in Phoenix.

Note: Originally printed in Western's employee publication, May 2008.