A brand new substation unveiled Wednesday and dedicated to the late Randolph Harley promises to bring more stability to the power situation on St. Thomas, St. John and Water Island.
Local dignitaries, V.I. Water and Power Authority officials and other guests paid tribute to Harley’s 30 years of work at the plant during opening ceremonies held Wednesday on St. Thomas. Those who spoke called him a quiet man and a hard worker, dedicated to his job and always ready to take young engineers under his wing.
Senate President Louis Hill at one point joked that Harley was down there so often, he even had a shower installed, which came in handy when he was working around the clock during Hurricane Marilyn.
Plans for the new substation got under way in 2007 but were redesigned in 2008 by WAPA Transmission Director Clinton Hedrington, who broke the project down into five phases and had most of the work completed by WAPA’s own staff, speakers said.
While impressive on the outside, what really caught everyone’s attention was the equipment inside the substation. With the new multi-million dollar system, WAPA now has one of the premier facilities in the region, said Hugo Hodge Jr., the authority’s executive director.
"This is a significant portion of reliability on the transmission and distribution side of our system," Hodge said. "Not only does it provide a means of distributing both transmission to the substations and some of the other customers, but it protects the rest of the system from a fault that may occur on any one of the feeders."
Hodge said, for example, that if a car hits a pole in Crown Bay and sends a surge back into the plant, one of the relays inside the substation will quickly catch it and stop it from affecting the other feeders.
"We’ll have switches here that can see a fault, see a problem and react faster," Hodge said. "That means less outages happening out there in the field."
WAPA Project Manager Cordell Jacobs Jr. said the system is fully redundant, with backups for every piece of equipment — and even some backups for the backups. Control switches for all of the district’s feeders are located in the substation, along with technology that allows WAPA officials to get alerts for problems out in the field.
The Harley substation is at the head of the district’s "power chain" and is tied to all other generators and substations in the district.
The substation cost approximately $13 million, with the funding coming from WAPA’s 2003, 2007 and 2010 series bonds. Hodge said there are two more substations under way on St. Croix.
