AUSTIN, Texas — Austin Energy has another power source online.
The Rainey Street Substation, located at the corner of East Avenue and Lambie Street, can now pump power throughout Downtown Austin.
City records show the substation increases the downtown grid by 33% and makes way for another downtown substation to be renovated.
The $35 million Rainey Street Substation project is part of Austin Energy’s “Repowering Downtown Initiative,” aimed at providing more power downtown to accommodate future growth.
City records show the entire initiative will:
“Increase Distribution Tie Circuits
Add 70 MVA (megavolt amperes) to Seaholm Substation
Build New Downtown Substation (Rainey Street Substation)
Rebuild Brackenridge Substation
Upgrade Network Distribution Feeder Circuits
Convert 69kV transmission lines to 138kV”
The Rainey Street substation sits on 1.46 acres and is one of nearly 80 substations across the city.
Public meetings about the project began in 2018. Community engagement ran for more than a year before designing began.
“Well, first and foremost, the aesthetic – you're talking about the rain garden, the EV charging, the park benches, the conservation of the landscape, specifically heritage oaks. Those are all really big factors,” Matt Mitchell, public information officer for Austin Energy, said.
Austin Energy moved water and wastewater lines in the spring of 2020. Then, it held another community engagement event to show plans and get feedback.
“This is the kind of effort that we want to put forward, and this is the kind of collaboration that we really treasure. All credit should go to the hundreds of people in this community that showed up for meetings for five years to make this place a reality and something that they wanted. They were proud to have in their community,” Mitchell said.
City records show the COVID-19 pandemic created delays, costing an additional $850,000. Austin Energy finalized the design in the spring of 2021.
“We kept hearing over and over, 'We want this to be something that we want to look at. We don't want it to just be this gray, nondescript building. Let's make it something that really fits in with the character of this neighborhood.' And clearly it achieves that,” Mitchell said.
Construction began in July 2021, five months after a deadly winter storm left 215,000 Austin energy customers without power for nearly a week.
Temperatures remained in single digits for days during the storm. At least 246 people died due to the storm, and 28 of those died in Travis County alone.
The City received community pushback about empty downtown buildings remaining lit while others sat in the freezing temperatures without power.
The KVUE Defenders asked Austin Energy if this project should have been delayed to spend time and money strengthening the power grid elsewhere.
“This was set in motion many years before Winter Storm Uri because we knew the energy needs were going to be acute. We knew the construction was coming here. We knew there was going to be an added need for infrastructure to distribute electricity to more customers. So, if we had taken this substation as it was planned and all of the sudden changed direction, gone and put it somewhere else, it wouldn’t have alleviated the need for more energy distribution infrastructure here in the downtown area. It would have robbed Peter to pay Paul, so to speak,” Mitchell said.
Austin Energy continues construction on both underground and overhead power lines to tie more of the new substation to the downtown grid.
The next stage of the Repowering Downtown Initiative is rebuilding the Brackenridge Substation.
Both Rainey Street Substation and Brackenridge use a gas-insulated switchgear (GIS), which costs more than a traditional substation stretched over a large property.
“The GIS technology allows for a very compact, high voltage substation, and is often required in high density areas where limited property is available,” city records show.
The Rainey Street Substation footprint is 0.81 acres, city records show.
“Everything in the downtown area is underground electric lines, electric distribution. So you want to make sure that not only is there resiliency, there's redundancy, which means that if something needs to come offline or gets tripped that there is a way to quickly restore power so that those outages are very short interruptions,” Mitchell said.
The Austin City Council is set to vote on a contract for the design and construction for Brackenridge substation during the next regular meeting on April 13, 2023. If approved, the contract will go to Jingoli Power, LLC for nearly $34 million.