EVERETT — The Snohomish County Public Utility District is about to get a new situation room.
The public utility district’s Energy Control Center is where all repairs and upgrades to the power system in the county are coordinated.
“Whenever we need
to change anything on the high voltage lines, they’re the ones who direct the workers,” said Chris Heimgartner, an assistant general manager at the PUD, of the people who work in the center.
“They’re like the air traffic controllers of the electric system,” he said.
Work recently began on a $12.1 million building that will enable the staff to work more efficiently and ultimately will make room for electronic upgrades to the PUD’s outage response system, Heimgartner said.
The new building near the Everett Boeing plant is right next to the building in which the Energy Control Center is currently housed. The center is part of a campus that houses the PUD’s electrical, service, warehousing and engineering staff in several buildings.
The three-story, 37,000-square-foot building will contain a new Energy Control Center; a “storm room” that serves as a communications hub in emergencies, and the PUD’s electronic data center. It’s expected to be finished by the end of 2012.
The current space and equipment are long outdated, officials say.
“We need a lot more room,” said Scott Faries, senior manager for construction and distribution for the PUD.
The current Energy Control Center features an 84-foot-long map that stretches across three walls and reaches about 12 feet high. The center is staffed with at least two dispatchers around the clock. During a storm, there might be six or seven people in the room, Faries said.
The map is a green pegboard on which nearly every high-voltage power line in the county is marked and numbered in different colors of tape.
Pegs and flags are used on the map to show where work is being done, so dispatchers know what’s happening in the field and a crew doesn’t turn the juice back on when another crew is working nearby.
“They’re ultimately responsible for everyone’s safety,” Heimgartner said of the dispatchers. “It’s really a big deal.”
The map board was created about 40 years ago for a utility that served 120,000 customers, Heimgartner said. Now the PUD has 320,000 customers, he said.
Whenever a new subdivision is built, or power lines are added anywhere, space has to be found somewhere on the board, even if it’s not contiguous with the rest of the map — sometimes it’s a small corner down by the floor or up by the ceiling. Some sections of the map are on sliding doors, like a giant bedroom closet.
During storms, or even during other busy times when crews are replacing poles or adding transformers, dispatchers have to move quickly to get all the locations tagged. Because of the old map, they have to slide walls in and out, get down on the floor and do more running around than they would otherwise.
This isn’t the most efficient use of staff time when things are popping and there’s no margin for error, Faries said.
“It’s a prime-time, don’t-be-distracted, real-time operation,” he said.
The new map will be almost 40 feet longer than the old one — at about 120 feet long and 16 feet high, with ladders. It will start a few feet off the floor for easier access.
Instead of pegboard it will be made of removable tiles that will have grid sections preprinted on them. If changes need to be made, the tiles can be taken out and reprinted with the new information.
Some utilities use electronic map boards, Heimgartner said, which are great when they work.
The problem, he said, is “if any major problem happens in your computer center, you’re toast.”
The new system will have an electronic component that will show what’s happening on monitors as well as on the physical map, Heimgartner said.
Outages are reported in two ways. Problems at substations or in major trunk lines come in electronically over specialized computer servers, and customers with problems call in to an outage hotline. Details from these calls are printed out on cards that are spit out of a machine in the Energy Control Center, and dispatchers send crews.
In the storm room, a window overlooks the control center. During storms, this room can hold up to 20 people who are working on various aspects of the system, Heimgartner said. The new storm room will be larger than the current one.
When vacated, the current Energy Control Center space will be used to house technical support staff and equipment, in addition to those moving to the first floor of the new building. Also, the current data center will be converted to expansion space for other departments that need it.
It’s not likely the public will notice any immediate difference with the new control center, Heimgartner said. In the long term, though, the PUD likely will be using more electronic methods to respond to outages, which could result in quicker repairs, and the new building will help make room for that, he said.
Toni Olson, a PUD commissioner and former employee, said the need for the new building has been discussed since 2003.
She’s worked on storm response before and believes the new building will make the process much more efficient.
“I’m quite excited about it,” she said. “In the end, the customer will be better off.”
Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439; sheets@heraldnet.com.
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