With an aging power network serving more and more people, Duquesne Light Co. has announced about $66 million worth of major projects to upgrade transmission lines.
Over the next few years, the Downtown-based electric utility plans to improve its network with three investments: a new, 5-mile transmission line from Penn Hills to Plum; new wires on a 7-mile existing line in the South Hills; and new lines and poles along a 15-mile existing line through Crescent, Moon and Robinson.
The transmission upgrades are part of the utility’s long-term spending plan to $2.9 billion from 2011 to 2021.
In a statement, Rich Riazzi, company president and chief executive officer, said the utility aims to “create the grid of the future.”
That means “investing significant resources to ensure that our region’s infrastructure — the wires, transformers, substations, poles and other equipment that make up the transmission and distribution system — meets our customers’ current and future electrical demands.”
Jason Harchick, senior manager for system planning and protection at Duquesne Light, said the utility constantly monitors computer models that analyze power demand across its network serving 500,000 homes and businesses in Allegheny and Beaver counties.
By forecasting demand five to 10 years in the future, planners can identify areas where investment is needed.
For all three projects, “the primary driver was load growth in the area,” Mr. Harchick said.
The utility will use new design concepts like monopoles, which resemble radio towers and have a significantly smaller footprint than a traditional electric transmission tower.
While the older lattice transmission towers are spread out with four legs and hold the power lines in widely outstretched arms, the monopoles will be placed in concrete foundations and hold the power lines at the very center of the utility’s 125-foot-wide right-of-way path.
The new line, called the Universal-Plum Reliability Project, is planned to span roughly 5 miles and zigzag northeast from a substation in Penn Hills to a substation in Plum, dipping briefly into Monroeville. Construction, projected to cost $15 million, is expected to begin January 2018 and wrap up by the end of that year.
The utility reached out to customers along the proposed path of the new transmission line near the end of last year and held open house events to hear concerns, spokeswoman Ashlee Yingling said.
That project will require about 40 steel monopoles, which range in height from 105 feet to 150 feet.
“We do our best to be as least impactful as possible,” Mr. Harchick said. “We do consider multiple routes, and we work with the customer to minimize the impact.”
In the South Hills project, the utility will spend $11 million to install new wires along an existing line that will permit increased flow of power from Scott to Bethel Park.
The largest project of the group is a $40 million upgrade from its Brunot Island substation to Crescent — a 15-mile journey that will require the replacement of transmission towers with 110 monopoles. That project is scheduled to run from February 2019 through the end of 2021.
The company is hosting three public comment sessions over the next two weeks on that particular project. The first is from 4 to 7 p.m. today in the Crescent municipal building, 225 Spring Run Road, Crescent 15046.
The utility this year is also testing a microgrid, a project that explores the feasibility of smaller, localized power grids contained within neighborhoods, developments that would render long-range transmission lines obsolete.
But the results of that experiment could be years down the road, the company has said, and the installation of microgrids even further in the future.
Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2743 and Twitter @PGdanielmoore.
First Published: February 21, 2017, 5:00 a.m.
