Delaware Electric Cooperative announced the pending completion of its Dorey Substation as it deals with growth in Sussex County.
Located on Zoar Road in Georgetown, the newest substation will replace the longstanding Zoar Switching Station to provide improved reliability to members in the area.
According to the manager of substations and system protection Tony Rutherford, Dorey Substation was developed in partnership with Delmarva Power, due to growth in the area.
“With all the growth that is happening in the Long Neck and Millsboro areas, the existing Zoar Switching Station was at a point where the circuit switcher was going to need to be changed out. So we contacted Delmarva Power, we told them what type of load we were going to have, and they decided to build what is called a ring bus off the existing Delmarva transmission line,” Rutherford said.
The project had its challenges.
“We had to go through all the various permitting agencies and get the rights from Delmarva Power to build the station,” Rutherford says. “You have to be able to present to them a certain amount of load before they will consider building the ring bus. This took about two or three years of discussions with Delmarva Power, to not only prove our load growth so that they would build the ring bus for us, but also to make sure for ourselves that we have the future anticipated growth coming for us to justify spending the money to build a substation.”
Now in the final stages of construction, Rutherford says Dorey Substation is set for completion later this fall.
“We’re at the point now where we’re making all final connections,” Rutherford says. “We are doing testing on breakers, testing on the relays; at some point soon the transformer manufacturer will be out to do a final inspection and make some wiring changes for us. We are landing and terminating all our control wires and distribution wires and basically getting it ready to the point where we will be able to energize it.”
Delmarva Power plans to officially energize Dorey Substation on October 19.
Also in the works is a substation near Lewes, with the Cape Gazette reporting that Delaware Electric paid $1 million for a nin-acre tract.
The cooperative works in an area with a patchwork of providers, including its system, Delmarva Power customers, and municipal electric utilities in Lewes.