Utility Distribution Upgrades: Black & Veatch and Trade Partners Form Unified Team for One Purpose: One Grid.

Georgia Power’s Grid Investment Plan is a multi-year initiative to strengthen its grid, make it more resilient, and continue delivering safe and affordable energy to its communities. Since 2020, Black & Veatch has served as a design-build contractor to upgrade the Utility’s distribution system.

The Grid Investment Plan includes:

• Adding smart line devices and connections to automatically isolate and reroute power in the case of an outage.

• Relocating lines for easier access and increasing response times for maintenance and repairs.

• Strengthening lines to improve reliability.

• Undergrounding distribution lines to protect lines from environmental impact.

As the final link between the grid and consumers, the distribution grid is becoming a focal point for grid investment, for not just Georgia Power but many utilities, putting engineering and construction resources in high demand. Working alongside its wholly-owned construction company, Overland Contracting Inc. (OCI), Black & Veatch brought two essential pieces to the Georgia Power program:

1. A large skilled labor force to scale the Utility’s workforce to solve the need for more resources

2. Proven experience successfully delivering large-scale, multi-site grid improvement projects.

"What sets Black & Veatch and OCI apart in the distribution space is our ability to unite subcontractors as one team and efficiently scale up a project," says Sam Scupham, Vice President, Grid Southeast Region. “We apply our proven experience in managing large, subcontracted crews to deliver projects as if we’re self-performing, ensuring everyone adheres to our safety standards and commitment to executing on time and within budget.”

As with any well-designed distribution upgrade, the Georgia Power Grid Investment Plan is an integrated, multi-faceted program involving resiliency and redundancy measures as well as smart devices for added control and automation. Black & Veatch is the design-build contractor for the following project scopes:

Overhead to underground line conversions

• Overhead feeder hardening

• Sectionalizing device deployment including switchgear, reclosers (Vipers & Versatechs), trip savers, and fuses

• Reconductoring overhead line sections

• Relocation of distribution feeder segments and adding ties

Many of these projects happened simultaneously in different regions across Georgia to meet program goals. Black & Veatch learned to apply its experience delivering nationwide, multi-site projects to power distribution. One of the most valuable contributions Black & Veatch made to the program was the ability to effectively manage its projects on a predictable and forecastable schedule with accurate month-to-month production and completion rates. This not only provided Georgia Power with valuable insights to effectively manage its budget but also enhanced safety and execution. We achieved the following in the first phase of work.

Achieving a One-Grid Mindset

Black & Veatch uses “three-week look aheads” as a last planner tool to identify critical tasks and ensure focus on key production goals, which yields significant safety and outage improvements. When the program started, OCI field teams experienced unplanned outages. Knowing this was unacceptable, the team promptly formulated a plan to address the issue. Along with the lookaheads, Black & Veatch implemented Critical Task Planning, pulling planning and Utility Avoidance Planning to minimize safety incidents and unplanned outages. At the same time, the team emphasized reporting Good Catches, Near Misses and People Matter Most (PMM) training as key leading indicators of an engaged safety culture.

“The culmination of Critical Task Planning, Three-Week Look Aheads as well as the PMMs, we have really formed One Grid, says Project Manager, Kimberly Wittman. “We are fortunate enough to have subcontractors who have bought into our very strict and serious BV safety culture…Now that we have that buy-in, we truly feel like we are One Grid. All of us are together, so goes one, so goes us all.”