Contact: Christina Kruger, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pacific Power, 541-776-5844 Nov. 15, 2018
Completion of Grants Pass substation upgrade to remedy issues behind recent Southern Oregon outages
Work on a $10 million project due to be complete in mid-December has temporarily made the local grid more prone to widespread outages
GRANTS PASS, Ore.--To meet increased usage, improve service reliability and enable further economic development, Pacific Power has been upgrading its transmission system in Southern Oregon since May. The upgrade work, however, has temporarily made the system more prone to outages that affect a broader number of customers.
‘We apologize for the inconveniences our customers are experiencing during this period,” said Christina Kruger, regional business manager for Pacific Power. “The ongoing work is necessary to improve the system to keep up with growth. We are a vibrant, growing community and our system needs to keep up with this growth. Right now, we are experiencing some growing pains while we are working on finishing our current reliability projects.”
During construction on a substation, the power system needed to be realigned to allow crews to work safely. This means that minor instances which might otherwise have caused a small, localized outage, tripped circuits across a larger area, as Southern Oregon experienced on Nov. 14.
Pacific Power is constantly upgrading its system to better serve customers. Several years ago, growth prompted the company to build the Whetstone substation near Kirkland Road in White City. In the coming years, Pacific Power will break ground on a $70 million investment to upgrade transmission lines in southern Oregon and build a new substation in the Sam’s Valley area to further enhance reliability and manage southern Oregon’s growing power needs.
“We will keep you posted on the progress on the Grants Pass substation work,” said Kruger. “We apologize for the inconvenience now but when the work is done, we should have an even more reliable electric grid than before.”
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About Pacific Power
Pacific Power provides electric service to nearly 750,000 customers in Oregon, Washington and California. Our goal is to provide our customers with value for their energy dollar, and safe, reliable electricity. Pacific Power is part of PacifiCorp, one of the lowest-cost electricity producers in the United States, with 1.9 million customers in six western states. For more information, visit www.pacificpower.net.