Proposed Hartsel Substation

Intermountain Rural Electric Association

Intermountain Rural Electric Association is an electric utility serving 139,000 customers across 5,000 square miles in the Denver, Colorado, region. Its territory ranges from sparse rural to dense suburban areas. GIS map posters play an integral role in the association’s open communications with county governments and residential developers regarding new construction and system improvements.

This poster revealed potential power quality problems to rural customers in the South Park region and demonstrated improvements that could be gained from a new substation. Based largely on the visual presentation, county commissioners approved the substation.

The individual maps on the poster contain two measures of electric distribution, electric load and service reliability. Electric load was created by interpolating the association’s transformer size (kVa) over a surface. This created a raster of connected kVa per square mile and was symbolized to show “hot spots” of electric load. Service reliability was simulated using a ring buffer to visualize voltage drop that might occur at distances away from the substations. Overlaying the two measures, as well as road networks, identified areas where potential load was higher while reliability was diminishing.

Courtesy of Intermountain REA, Duane Holt.

Map Book Page [PDF]