Homer Electric Association crews are working on several projects on Kalifornsky Beach Road involving the lines and the poles.
HEA’s Director of Member Relations, Keriann Baker tells KSRM that crews are doing line replacement and moving the poles:
“So that particular line on K-Beach Road. It’s fed from our Billy Thompson substation, but sometimes, for all sorts of reasons, we’ll take Billy Thompson offline, some is for maintenance. What happens is we feed the line. When we take that line from Billy Thompson and we feed it from a different substation, it’s causing some voltage issues. It’s not the best use of that line. Our engineers went back and looked at it and thought, how do we get this to run better and more efficiently. We know it’s not accommodating what we need it to do. they did a design project where they decided they’re going to replace that line with a larger line that can be accommodated not just from the Billy Thompson substation, but from other substations as well.”
At the same time, HEA crews determined to move the electricity poles back:
“If we’re going to do this work, we know DOT may someday in the future want to expand the road. They’ve made no indication to us. There’ve been no discussions about it. We’re not aware of any plans. HEA went and designed things and just thinks, let’s just save the most amount of money in a given set of circumstances. We went ahead and decided if we’re going to replace the line with a bigger line for technical reasons, why wouldn’t we do the work to pull the poles a little bit further, that way in the future, if someone comes along and says, we’re expanding the road, we’re not bearing the same costs twice. That’s why it was done. The project’s probably going to be completed by the end of October and it’s just us not trying to incur costs twice if there ever is an expansion.”
Baker said that Homer Electric Association designed these two projects to save money, be forward thinking, more efficient, and for safety reasons. The projects are eyeing an October 2022 completion.