GREENFIELD — Residents may notice heavy equipment clearing trees and drilling holes near the bike path between Greenfield and Montague, as National Grid begins a 7-month project to upgrade and place existing transmission lines onto separate structures.
John Gavin, vice president of Electric Asset Management at National Grid, said about 2.7 miles of double-circuited transmission lines that run between Adams Road “Cabot Junction” station southwest toward Turners Falls and extending south to Eversource’s Cabot Station substation in Montague City will be divided into two separate lines.
“The reason why we’re doing that, if you have a tower fail, you’re going to lose both circuits,” he said. “By splitting it this way, you don’t have a single point of failure.”
Construction on the Cabot Taps Separation Project began Feb. 16 and is expected to wrap up by November, according to Gavin.
“The activities that folks are going on out there right now is right-of-way clearing, which started around mid-February,” he said, adding trucks will also be drilling 53 new foundations.
Gavin said the foundations will take 27 weeks to install and the utility poles are being installed concurrently, and will take about 28 weeks to complete. Both portions of the project will be done by September.
“We’ll be starting to install wire — that’s the actual conductor — at the beginning of March and the wire installation will be completed in October,” he said. “We’ve been working closely with abutters along the right-of-way.”
He said the bike path between Greenfield and Montague is along that right-of-way, and as part of the permitting process, National Grid had to keep it passable. Workers, he said, have even been sweeping the bike path every day.
“That’s some of the sensitivity that’s been around it,” he said.
Gavin added National Grid is also working closely with the Department of Recreation and Conservation as well as First Light, which owns Cabot Station.
He said residents may also see cranes installing 58 new towers as part of the project. Currently, there are about half that number.
The new lines will follow the existing path and the right-of-way will not change, Gavin said, but some trees will have to be trimmed to make room for the two separate lines.
“We’ve got all the necessary permits from the various environmental groups and regulators in the area,” he said.
The project was generated by a 2008 western Massachusetts study, which looked at what the needs are from both a reliability and a capacity standpoint, according to Gavin. He said the study was done in conjunction with Eversource and ISO New England, an independent, nonprofit organization responsible for managing the operations of the New England transmission grid on a daily basis.
“Our planning horizon is quite long,” he said. “It’s really a collaborative effort for the improvement of the entire grid.”
You can reach Aviva Luttrell at: aluttrell@recorder.com
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