Major hydro upgrades

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/02/2016 (3570 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The first of two major new Manitoba Hydro power-distribution substations under construction in Winnipeg should be coming into service this summer.

The substations are at 555 Madison St. near Polo Park, and on the northwest corner of Notre Dame Avenue and Adelaide Street in the West Exchange District.

 

The Madison Street substation, which is under construction south of Ellice Avenue, is the largest of the two replacement projects. It’s being built at a cost of $87 million and is scheduled to come on stream this summer to supply electricity to homes and businesses in the Polo Park area, the airport and nearby industrial areas.

It replaces the old substation that’s housed in the building on the northwest corner of St. James Street and Portage Avenue — the one with the big Hydro mural on the wall.

The Adelaide Street substation, which will take up almost a full square block, is only about half-completed. It is scheduled to come on stream in March of next year to supply power to Winnipeg’s downtown area and will replace the 105-year-old substation that’s housed inside a red brick building on King Street just north of Notre Dame — the City Electric Power Supply Building. The cost of that project is $62 million.

The Adelaide station is being built on a large surface parking lot Hydro acquired from the nearby Calvary Temple. To replace those parking stalls, Hydro helped put together a package of transactions that saw Calvary Temple acquire a surface parking lot and some buildings on the north side of Notre Dame — 312 and 318 Notre Dame. The plan was to demolish the buildings and convert the properties into surface parking stalls for the church.

The Madison Street and Adelaide Street projects are part of what’s referred to as Hydro’s 20-by-20 program. The program will see the utility replace, refurbish or modernize 20 of its 97 Winnipeg substations by the year 2020 at a cost of about $470 million.

About one-quarter of the 20 projects are either completed or nearing completion. They include a new substation that was built on Martin Avenue to replace an adjacent one built in the 1950s, and another new one built on Burrows Avenue to replace two older, smaller ones on Charles Street and Alfred Avenue.

Most of the other projects involve modernizing and/or expanding existing substations.

Manitoba Hydro public affairs manager Scott Powell said the new Madison and Adelaide substations are being built because the old ones are operating at maximum capacity and there was no room for further expansion on the existing sites.

“Downtown, with all the development we’ve seen over the last five to 10 years, that’s really taxing the system down there,” he said. And it’s a similar story for the Polo Park area.

Both of the new substations are designed to allow for expansion in the future.

“You don’t want to spend millions and millions of dollars and in 15 years be back where you were,” Powell added.

He said the fact the King Street substation lasted for more than a century speaks to the foresight of the engineers who designed it.

About one-third of the new Adelaide substation will be housed inside a building. The rest will be outdoors. But as is the case with the Madison station, the entire property will be surrounded by an architectural wall.

Powell said the switchover to the two new stations will be done gradually.

“For some period of time (after Adelaide comes on stream), King Street (station) will continue to be in service because you can’t switch everything over all at the same time,” he explained. “So over time we’ll start moving load over, and it’s the same with Madison.”

Powell said it will likely be a couple of years before Hydro decides what to do with the old properties, both of which it owns. It’s possible it may decide to keep some equipment in the buildings and use them as backups for the two new substations, he added. Or it may decide to clean them up and sell them.

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca