EPHRATA — The Grant County Public Utility District will be working on the construction of new transmission lines, upgrading its generating capacity and planning a new maintenance center in Ephrata in 2025. Those are some of the projects included in the PUD’s capital budget for next year.  

The total cost of all the projects in the capital budget was projected at $239.9 million. Of that, about $179.9 million will go to electrical system expansion, said Christine Pratt, PUD public information officer, in a press release. 

The major project that’s not part of the electrical system is the planning and preparation for building a new maintenance center, known as a service center, in Ephrata.  

About $26.2 million is budgeted for upgrades to the turbines at Priest Rapids Dam and about $12.8 million for generator upgrades. It’s part of a multi-decade project to increase generation at Priest Rapids and Wanapum dams. The work at Wanapum has been completed and is at about the halfway point at Priest Rapids. 

The new service center project was budgeted at about $32.22 million for 2025. 

“For us a service center is our warehouse function, our electric shop; our substation and transmission line folks work out of there, and our transportation facilities. And telecom too,” said Tim Fleisher, PUD facilities manager.  

The existing service center is on A Street Southeast, where it’s been since the mid-1970s. Whether or not to move it was one of the questions studied as part of the PUD’s facilities plan.  

That part of the study took a couple years, he said. The conclusion was that the existing site was too small and couldn’t be expanded.  

“At that point, we realized that the property and the buildings we own were just not a good value to keep putting that kind of funding (in) and expect to support our customers in the way we needed to,” Fleisher said.  

Fallon Long, PUD chief enterprise shared services officer, said the PUD has grown – a lot.  

“We had only 19 substations, and we’re over 56 now,” Long said. “Our electric meters, we started with16,000 in the mid-70s and now we’re over 55,000.”  

The current site is about 17 acres and is surrounded by other business sites, train tracks and steep terrain, which limited the ability to expand, Long said. The new site, located on Southeast A Avenue near the new Grant County Jail, is 34 acres.  

Total project cost is still to be determined, Pratt said. Construction on the new facility, about 240,000 square feet, is scheduled to start in 2026.  

The electrical system projects include about $12.2 million for continued work on a new high-voltage transmission line between Wanapum Dam and the Quincy area. The goal is to bring additional electrical capacity to Quincy, home to businesses that use a lot of power.  It’s a multiyear project, with work on the design and permitting scheduled for 2025. 

Additional transmission lines in and around Quincy are planned; two projects around the Mountain View substation on the west end of town are budgeted for about $21.6 million.  

Upgrades to a substation near Wheeler Road in Moses Lake were budgeted at about $9.5 million. A new transmission line near Royal City is scheduled for construction, with a 2025 budget of about $10.27 million. 

Work is also scheduled on the Ruff substation near East Wheeler Road in Moses Lake. The project is budgeted at $9.53 million.  

The studies conducted for the capital facilities plan demonstrated a need for a new service center in Moses Lake, and PUD commissioners purchased land on Road L Northeast for it earlier this year. While the new Moses Lake facility is the second project on the facilities plan list, Long said it’s still a way off. 

“At this time, we’re just holding on to that land until we can get through this (Ephrata) project a little further. Then we can determine next steps (on the Moses Lake project).” Long said.  

The capital projects budget includes about $650,000 for upgrades to the heating-cooling system at the PUD headquarters in Ephrata. A new headquarters facility is scheduled for construction within the next decade, according to the facilities plan. Fleisher said even though the building is scheduled for replacement eventually, it needs to work properly now. 

“There’s always that balance, that we have to keep our facilities operational,” he said. “We’re at 30 years now since the last major remodel of that building, and unfortunately some of the (components) that we’re replacing, we can no longer get parts for, and we can no longer keep up to date on the maintenance because of the age of the equipment.”