Columbia Substation equipment installation increases reliability

In Fall 2001, ATC’s Transmission Planning Group identified improvements that needed to be made at the Columbia substation in order to improve reliability. In Spring 2002, ATC installed a breaker and one-half configuration at the Columbia 345 kV substation that provided increased reliability for one of the three lines that exit the substation. In total, approximately $2.6 million will be spent to improve the reliability on all of the three lines by the end of the project in April 2003.

PHASE 1 Install a 345kV breaker to keep Columbia--North Madison in service in case one breaker failed and to upgrade the relay system PHASE 2 Install an additional 345kV breaker and upgrade the relay system on the Columbia -- South Fond du Lac and Columbia -- Rockdale lines

ATC and Alliant employees teamed up to complete the first phase of the project in a very short, eight-month time frame. These crews went "the extra mile" to complete the project. Matt Weber, ATC Project Manager, complimented the crews. He said, "without the combined efforts of these individuals, the benefits of this work would not have been realized."

The benefit of this work was soon realized. On February 9, 2003, a failure of one of the two breakers on the Columbia to North Madison line occurred. It took ten days to repair the breaker; however, the work that was done to install the new breaker at Columbia avoided costly redispatch and allowed construction work to continue on other important transmission lines. The potential impact of this outage would have cost ATC customers almost $3 million.

ATC Transmission Reliability Administrator Bill Hoesly offered, "from this one event, it is evident that the breaker addition at Columbia was critical to system reliability."