In a recent interview with the American Public Power Association, Janet Lonneker, Assistant General Manager for Electric Services at California public power utility Anaheim Public Utilities, details the utility’s efforts to place transmission lines underground.
“It's one of our prized programs,” she said. “We've been undergrounding major roadways in Anaheim under our program since 1990, similar to the investor-owned utilities Rule 20 program,” she noted. Rule 20 is the tariff in California that governs utility undergrounding of overhead wires at the request of third parties (e.g., local governments, businesses, and residential customers).
“Projects are determined and prioritized by a five-person underground conversion subcommittee, which is made up of utility board members and our city's planning department. To date, we've undergrounded about 140 circuit miles of overhead lines in Anaheim and we also feature the first fully underground substation in the United States,” Lonneker said in a recent episode of APPA’s Public Power Now podcast.
With respect to the underground substation, she noted that the eastern portion of Anaheim is primarily hilly topography and Canyon areas and considered a higher fire threat zone.
“We needed to build a substation near what is primarily residential areas and so of course nobody wants a substation in their backyard,” Lonneker said.
“And so we put our heads together, worked with the community to figure out how we could possibly build a substation greatly needed in the area for increasing growth, but make it so that it's functional for the residents in the area and that it's protected from wildfires,” she noted.
“It was determined through what's called a charrette, where the community gets involved along with our utility professionals and as well as our city leaders to determine that we should place this substation underground and so the substation...is a gas insulated substation, so it takes a little bit less footprint than a typical above ground substation. It is contained in concrete below ground and above that substation is a park that is used by the area residents there, so it's dual purpose and that's how we were able to build what we needed for reliability for the utility, but also address our community and our customers’ needs and make it a functional benefit for them in the area.”
Supply Chain Strategies
Meanwhile, Lonneker also detailed the strategies the utility has adopted to meet supply chain challenges.
“It's been a major challenge for us, particularly in the last three years. Anaheim is a mid-size utility compared to investor-owned utilities, other neighboring utilities, and we serve 126,000 electric meters, which is about the 10th of the size of an investor-owned type utility,” she said.
“So on the supply chain side of things and the simple economics of supply and demand, we are a little bit lower on the supply chain priority list, meaning what we are competing against are first FEMA to address storm situations and all of these recent hurricanes that we have seen -- devastating the infrastructure, devastating the people, the residences. Those need to be addressed first and I think everybody understands that, so manufacturers direct their infrastructure, direct their product towards rebuilding.”
The investor-owned utilities “are second in line for what are long lead items such as transformers, switches, cable -- all of these things which used to be about a 30-week window for delivery have now become at least one year to two years in lead time to receive this equipment.”
So for example, “we have some fairly simple distribution transformers that are used throughout neighborhoods to serve power to residences and we ordered these all the time. And typically we've been waiting about 23 weeks for these orders to keep up with the demand. We're now waiting 52 weeks and in some instances, we are now waiting up to two years and we're really struggling to balance the delivery of our equipment with the growth demand here in Anaheim.”
She said that “some of the ways we've been mitigating that is we've been looking at increasing the number of manufacturers that we bid out our equipment to. So for instance, we would typically have a few domestic partners that we would bid out. It's all competitively bid, but we were seeing some of the same vendors bidding on our transformers, for example.”
Those vendors “are no longer able to meet our needs and our delivery dates because they are being pulled in many directions and they themselves aren't receiving enough of the components from their vendors and their manufacturers. So again, extended lead times,” Lonneker said.
“So we've gone out and we have had to increase our manufacturers to some overseas manufacturers. The overseas manufacturers are able to ship faster than our domestic partners are. I don't quite understand the reasoning for that. But that's an example of something we've had to do is actually go overseas to find some additional manufacturers to meet our need.”
Some other things "we're doing is we're trying to partner with other utilities, economies of scale -- like I said, Anaheim is a medium size utility and there are plenty of smaller utilities, public owned utilities in the surrounding areas who have even less economies of scale than Anaheim does. So how can we bundle together to create a a larger order, more demand for a manufacturer to be able to put us higher on the priority list, so we are looking for ways to partner with other companies for other utilities in order to do that. Some of the other things we do is it's interesting to me that a lot of the utilities, even the ones surrounding Anaheim, we have very different systems," she said.
"And I think it all just kind of developed over time. So, for example, our system is very similar to Southern California Edison just in how it's configured and the voltages that we use. We have a neighboring utility, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has a very different system."
So sharing of materials, bundling together, "makes it a little difficult because we all have different systems, which is unusual to me. What we are trying to do though is trying to make sure that the equipment we order and those with similar systems that we try to consolidate and make it so that it's standardized, that we don't have any customized equipment that we're ordering that we would be one offs from other utilities such as Edison. So if Edison's ordering a certain type of transformer, it's in our best interest to also have the same standard so that we can then, of course, through economies of scale, have an order go through a manufacturer of similar nature. So those are some of the things we're trying to do, get rid of the customization of our equipment, make it more standard. We are trying to group together with other medium to smaller utilities so that we can increase our economies of scale and we are looking for overseas manufacturers to supplement with our domestic partners to supply equipment to us."
APU is a municipal owned electric and water utility that serves residents and businesses within the city boundaries of Anaheim, which is approximately 50 square miles. It's the 10th largest city in California – with a population of 360,000.
As the assistant general manager of Electric Services, Lonneker manages the electric side of the utility, which is the electric system planning, substation and transmission and distribution engineering, system operations, which monitors the system 24/7 and can reroute power during outages.
"And I also oversee the electric field personnel like the line crews, troubleshooting, metering, testing and inspection. So basically, I oversee power delivery, whatever it takes to deliver power after the generator to the meter," she noted.
