PUD upgrades top $12M

Work should begin on the project later this year.

The PUD is also buying from the Bonneville Power Administration the Chenowith-Harvey transmission line, a mile-long line that runs between the BPA Chenowith substation and the old aluminum plant.

The line would cost $2 million to build new, and the PUD is getting it for $500,000, Hall said.

Earlier this summer, the PUD board authorized up to $20 million in bonded indebtedness to pay for the substation, transmission line, and improvements to data and electrical system security.

Refinement of numbers has brought that figure down significantly, and the bond amount will be around $12 million. The PUD will borrow the money and pay it back through its own revenues from ratepayers.

Google purchased 22 acres in the new Columbia Gorge Industrial Center, property owned by the Port of The Dalles that once housed the Mt. Fir Lumber Co. The industrial center has about 60 acres in all, situated near Taylor Lake and west of Chenowith Creek.

The PUD paid off a 10-year revenue bond in 2015, leaving the utility with no debt, and it was looking at steps to meet the need of future power demands, Hall said.

With Google moving in and the anticipation of other businesses to follow, “we need to add some infrastructure to support that,” he said.

A substation receives power on the main transmission lines from the BPA, and slows down both the volume and speed of the electricity so it can then be distributed via transmission lines to customers. It comes in at 115,000 volts and leaves at 12,000 volts. The metal cans on transmission lines slow the power further so it comes into homes at 220 volts, where it is slowed further at the fuse box to 110 volts for household use.

Hall said the PUD has enough capacity for current needs, but it wants to be able to accommodate growth.

The PUD has eight substations, two for transmission and six for distribution.

On the substation, $6 million of the $8 million cost will come from bond money. The rest will come from reserves and future income. The rest of the bonded amount will be put into upgrades in the data system and the electrical supply system, including $500,000 in information technology improvements to both boost cyber security and improve customer experience.

Also slated is replacing a transformer at the Threemile substation at a cost of $800,000.

Those improvements will happen over the next three years.

The cyber security efforts are meant to protect customers and maintain the functionality of the system. “You probably heard about Delta Airlines’ system being breached,” Hall said.

Delta Airlines was shut down worldwide by a power outage.

That was a cyber security issue, he said. “And you hear constantly about the elaborate efforts to gain customer information… It’s a constant threat and it’s something we take very seriously and we try to protect our customers from.

“We haven’t had that issue, knock on wood, but we need to make upgrades to our system to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Hall was calling the Chronicle from Boston, where he and other PUD officials were attending a conference on cyber security. As to whether the new bond will lead to an increase in power rates, Hall said the PUD was looking at that, and any decision on that would come next spring.

The PUD typically has power increases every other year, which is when the BPA increases its rates to the PUD.

Residential customers saw a 4.2 percent increase in 2013 and a 5.2 percent increase in 2015. A home using the typical 1,000 kilowatt hours in a month pays about $68.

The next BPA power rate increase will be in fall 2017. The PUD has absorbed some of the BPA rate increases, but “how much we can continue to do that we’ll have to see,” Hall said.

PUD customers here enjoy some of the lowest power rates in Oregon, he said.

The availability of fiber optic data lines and the cheap power were the chief draws that brought Google to The Dalles to build its largest data center in the U.S., Hall said.