The reliability of Clark County’s electrical system makes it easy to forget about the massive grid and round-the-clock human efforts that keeps a steady, stable flow of power moving into our community.
Clark Public Utilities purchases about 68 percent of its power. The majority of it, about 46 percent, is produced by hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River Basin, the rest is produced by a combination of nuclear, wind and other sources. About 32 percent is produced by the utility’s River Road Generating Plant.
After the electricity is generated, it has to be prepared to move long distances. From there, the power immediately goes to a transformer station where it’s stepped up from about 14,000 volts to anywhere between 100,000 and 765,000 volts. At those levels it’s ready to travel across transmission lines.
Those lines are like freeways for energy, built to move massive quantities of power to community utilities across the land. Once it arrives, power companies are responsible for delivering it to their customers as safely and reliably as possible.
One of those utilities is yours: Clark Public Utilities. It delivers roughly 4.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually to about 211,000 customers through a grid of 6,600 miles of transmission and distribution lines, attached to 62,000 power poles and running through 55 substations throughout the county.
“Maintaining balance between your supply and customer demand is one of the most important aspects to operating a distribution system,” said Clark Public Utilities Director of Operations Gene Morris. “That stable balance is how outages and power failures are prevented. Plus, it reduces strain on the utility grid and ensures customers receive clean, consistent electricity.”
Clean electricity is crucial. Residential customers most likely won’t ever notice tiny fluctuations in their energy supply, but specific businesses, such as computer chip manufactures and other companies that use precise machinery need a stable flow. Even the tiniest fluctuations can cause problems for their highly sensitive equipment.
Power distribution begins at the local utility’s substations where power is stepped down to the tens of thousands of volts. They’re strategically located around the community and sized to meet that area’s load demand. Because each station is a major investment of time and resources, they’re only built or upgraded after years of planning and careful consideration of load growth and demand changes. Substations are like arterial streets for electricity: they’re good for large quantities of localized flows, but at levels too high for residential settings.
From the substations, electricity travels to distribution transformers. Look around your neighborhood and you’re sure to spot them. With buried utility lines, they’re often inside the big green boxes standing near the street or they’re the large gray cylinders hung high on power poles.
They’re like the side streets of power. They step down the power further to 120/240 volts, the level used in most residential homes. But when a residential or business customer needs more than that, Clark Public Utilities is happy to customize the feed to meet their needs.
The last leg of the journey is like a residential driveway. The electricity travels from the transformer to a service line that is connected to a meter at the side of your home or business where you enjoy the many conveniences of modern living.
“A lot of folks may forget all the steps required to deliver power to their homes or businesses, but we’re OK with that. We want our customers to be focused on what’s going on with them, not worrying about the local energy supply” Morris said. “We make tremendous investments in our local grid to make sure our supply is as reliable and affordable as it can be.”
Energy Adviser is written by Clark Public Utilities. Send questions to ecod@clarkpud.com or to Energy Adviser, c/o Clark Public Utilities, P.O. Box 8900, Vancouver, WA 98688
