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wHAT iS ThiS pLaCE?? 3

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itsmoked

Electrical
Feb 18, 2005
19,114
A friend just back from Kauai was puzzled by this building he passed. Seems like a lot of power to a pretty innocuous building with no visible exhaust stacks. Zoom in behind the transformer line-up and you can see large insulators sticking out of the wall.

What do you folks think it is?

Google link to street view of it

Funny as you move one foot to the right a bunch of trucks appear. LOL. Maybe it's a teleportation node?

Keith Cress
kcress -
 
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Probably a distribution substation. The 115kV (or there about) is GIS gear indoors with through the wall bushings feeding the transformers. Notice the two transmission transitions to underground. Probably has the distribution switchgear indoors as well. Put the oil filled stuff outside and everything else inside. Probably rides out storms much better than a fully outdoor substation would.
 
Looks like one of their deep well pump stations, I think they have about 15-20 of them around the island. There is a similar looking building near Barking Sands this is one of those stations.

MikeL.
 
David nailed it. There are three nearby poles that have distribution feeder getaway cables attached to each of three different circuits.
 
Might be a substation, but that's not a distribution substation, it looks like it's there to feed a pump station. Likely a bunch of large MV deep well submersible pumps fed by a double ended substation and the building off to one side is a backup generator.


" We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know." -- W. H. Auden
 
If it is a pump station, why two transmission circuits and multiple distribution circuits? For a pump station it would seem that there would either be the transmission or the distribution, but not both. I'd also expect a tank or two if it were a pumping station; need some form of surge capacity.
 
Take a look at the lines.
There is what looks like a transmission line arranged vertically on one set of poles.
There is what looks like a distribution line arranged horizontally on a second set of poles.
There does not seem to be a connection to the distribution circuit.
The transmission line is not continuous. The line from each direction enters the station.
Two feeds into a pumping station for redundancy?

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
If you move around enough, there are two transmission lines and three distribution feeders. There are five overhead feeds into/out of that facility plus an unknown number (may be zero) of underground feeds. If it was a pump station with that much redundancy, I'd expect to see an additional level redundancy in the form of emergency generator exhaust stacks. I could be wrong, but pump station just doesn't "fit" the facility as far as I can tell from limited experience with pumping facilities and lots of substation experience.
 
Storms, and salt spray... Never had to worry about salt spray. Nasty stuff for a substation to have to deal with. Going indoors seems a no-brainer in that instance.
 
Looks like links have already been provided, but my vote is substation. There are thousands of these little substations around the US alone, this one happens to be partly indoor construction.
 
Gads Bacon! How'd you hunt that down? Amazing.

I learned a lot here. Thanks everyone for pitching in on the puzzle.

My lucky buddy stayed in a 4-1/2 star resort. It wasn't 5 star and never could be because it has no air conditioning. He said it was roasting all day and night. All power on the island is apparently engine generators running on bunker oil. He managed to get a tour of the plant and listed off about 6 different makes of engines. Some were locomotive engines and some were ship engines. Everyone was directed to do washing and major appliance use during the day when solar is present. He went to take a shower at night but the time clock that kills the water heater late at night had shut off the heat to conserve power.

Keith Cress
kcress -
 
All available publicly, and to someone driving by. I wonder why the need to obscure the sign in Steetview. Link
 
Bacon; You should moonlight as a private detective. Thanks for the tip.

All available publicly, and to someone driving by. I wonder why the need to obscure the sign in Steetview. Link

I'm pretty sure all the obscuration is auto-computer done, maybe it thought that it was a license plate.

Weird! To test my theory I thought I'd google-map over to several substations in my town, that I've been too in the past, and of the five I went to two are completely wiped away!! No sign of them. How can they do that? How does a power company find they can delete moderate sized substations??

Keith Cress
kcress -
 
The first one was definitely a substation at one point but appears to have been decommissioned. My guess is that it was fed at a low subtransmission or high distribution voltage and then transformed that down to say 4kV; over time the 4kV was converted to a higher distribution voltage and the need for the 4kV source disappeared.

On the second one all of the structures were gone from that dark asphalt area by August 2008 and all of the earlier images are too low resolution to know what might have been there. Again it might have been an increase in distribution voltage that eliminated the need for that location.
 
And, the 7/29/2007 image of the Hawaii location appears to have an old box structure substation at that location, but the image resolution is poor and the details can't be seen to confirm that.
 
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