Minden 34.5 KV Substation

The City of Minden, Nebraska's north substation was at the end of its life in terms of equipment vintages, technology, physical condition, and Code 1 conformance. Some components were failing, and service reliability to the city's customers was affected. The City Council approved an aggressive budget to replace the outdoor structures, cabling, and indoor oil circuit breakers. Olsson worked with city staff to design and implement a solution that would meet the needs of several issues, including capacity, reliability, efficiency, safety, and cost.

One early challenge to the replacement project was that the two substation transformers, the 34,500-volt subtransmission feeds, and the six existing distribution circuits had to remain energized during construction. The city's other substation couldn't provide adequate service to customers during an outage of the north substation. Because of this, the new structures and switchgear needed to be substantially complete before any demolition of the old substation. Olsson's design team responded to this challenge by envisioning a hybrid substation, a style that would use outdoor substation features coupled with indoor switchgear concepts.

The result was a new substation with higher flexibility, higher reliability, significantly lower cost, and a reduced physical presence. The cornerstone of this substation design was the innovative Duplex Recloser Structure, which provides reliability comparable to the most expensive traditional designs at a cost comparable to the least expensive traditional designs.