On Friday, September 9th, the Mohawk Substation Project, which broke ground on April 7th, 2020, was officially completed with the build-out of four new distribution circuits! This substation primarily serves industrial and residential customers in the city’s northeast quadrant. The addition of this substation not only supports McPherson’s anticipated growth; it will also increase our reliability in providing additional ways to reroute power in the event of an unforeseen outage. This ability to reroute power will help reduce the time customers are without power. While only four circuits were targeted in this initial phase, there is plenty of opportunity for growth out of this substation as demand increases.
The BPU would like to, once again, thank Black and Veatch for engineering support services, Sturgeon for transmission line construction, and Hutton Construction for foundation and below-grade construction. Last but certainly not least, we would like to thank our incredibly talented electric and maintenance crews! The BPU is exceedingly proud of its skilled crews, who performed the bulk of the above-grade work. We are extremely fortunate to have the in-house expertise to construct a project of this scope and magnitude, which is not typical for a utility. This provides an invaluable learning opportunity for crews. Subsequently the project was 20% under budget, which was primarily contributed to performing this work ourselves and providing in-house project management.
To see how the substation project progressed in the first year, check out the time-lapse videos provided by Hutton Construction, https://www.mcphersonpower.com/2021/05/time-lapse-of-bpu-mohawk-substation-project/