Pangborn Development Site V
Work continues building out the Giga Watt facilities at Pangborn
MAY 18
On Tuesday we got half of the H-Frame up, however there needs to be steel workers on site to cut and weld a few more of the cross members together. The PUD has scheduled maintenance on our line so that we can do the necessary work to bring power to the site between May 25th-30th.
We have scheduled the cranes, steel workers and man lifts for this work. We had Green Leaf Excavation in on Wednesday and Thursday digging and completing the trenches and laying the conduit for both the PUD’s Transformers as well and ours.
The ground grid got delayed by Nepel electric due to heavy rain, this should be completed next week. Sigmasix was also working with Nepel electric this week testing each pod and the switchgear to determine that everything was in compliance and all connections were correct.
Today we met with the PUD’s Sr Field Engineer and L&I to check off our last few items on our list. In this meeting L&I expressed that they needed more time to create the regulations as they have not let a private company ever run and operate a substation over 600 Volts in the state of Washington. The PUD said that they possibly would be willing to operate the substation as long as L&I approve and sign off on it. We will be meeting with L&I officials next Wednesday at 9:00am to determine this outcome for both the mobile and the permanent substation.
MAY 15
We have met with the PUD and they will be shutting down the hotline temporarily tomorrow morning so that our crews begin their work. The crane operators as well as the electricians will be onsite to begin the installation of the H-Frame.
The weather looks good and the wind should be at a low enough speed that it should not create any further delays. The drilling company has finished topping off the wells and they are now sealed and will be awaiting the ground grid to be laid this week.
MAY 11
Transformers have been transported from Moses Lake to Pangborn this afternoon and cranes are onsite to offload them and set them in place.
They are placing two of ours and one on the PUD side. While the cranes are here we are going to attempt to get up the H-Frame, weather permitting (wind) and the PUD needs to shut off the hot line on their end. We should have an update later about this.
We are currently working with Puget Sound Energy to get the mobile substation UL certified per L&I standards and regulations. The drilling company will be topping off the grounding wells this afternoon with bentonite chips to seal it and make way for crews to lay the grounding grid on Monday.
Once the grounding grid (copper coil throughout the substation site) is laid we can backfill it with top soil and special asphalt gravel. The Mobile Substation should be certified by this time and will be ready to relocate to our site for hookup and finally power. We will be meeting with the PUD and L&I on Monday or Tuesday to make sure we can do all of the necessary work to L&I’s expecations. Talos Construction, our contractor who has built all of our pods, were onsite doing some finishing work on a few pods and getting a few more fans installed. The deployment team is putting the finishing touches on the equipment in the pods to have it ready for final deployment.
MAY 7
Giga-Watt and Douglas County PUD officials met on Monday afternoon to go over the final checklist of approval for gaining power for the mobile substation.
We will complete the grounding grid in two days to the requirements of IEEE 80 standards and the PUD is fine with the provided details on relay settings. The PUD will suggest a contractor to us as they lack operating engineers. We are waiting for a list of approved contractors from them to figure out if that will align with L&I requirements.
The PUD is allowed exemptions from normal inspection procedures and we will not have the same standards, we will be meeting with L&I tomorrow to go over these. The company that built our H-Frame will be out tomorrow to fix the footings.
Temporary fencing has been installed around most of the site and asphalt trucks were out paving the road. The last few items on our list are in different stages and we will have them resolved this week.
MAY 4
We have hit our depth of 500 feet for our grounding well and the PUD has signed off on the resistance test that was done. We can now begin backfilling the substation site and prepare it for connecting it to the grid and asphalt.
The company that provided our H-Frame made a mistake on the holes that fit into our concrete columns, they are currently working on a quick solution and we will hopefully have it fixed and installed next week. Our curbs and sidewalks have been formed and poured and next week we will have asphalt being laid as our site will be nearing completion.
The Chelan county PUD is putting a lot of pressure on the county to discontinue home mining operations and some of that FUD is tightening up restrictions and regulations in our county.
Giga-Watt is continuing to work closely with Douglas county PUD to ensure that we get this site up and running as quickly as possible. The PUD assured us that they would be giving us a final checklist and approval of our plans for the mobile substation this week, but they have failed to deliver it and have now informed us they would approve the plans by 10am on Monday.
