Client: Portland General Electric
Location: Dayton, WA
Service Provided: Construction Inspection
In the hills outside the small town of Dayton, Washington you’ll find something very big: PGE’s Tucannon River Wind Farm, which comprises 20,000 acres. The numbers associated with the project are impressive:
- 116 turbines
- 267 megawatts of total installed capacity
- 234 miles of 34.5kV underground collection cable
- 42 miles of access roads
- 5 miles of 230kV transmission line
Tucannon River Wind Farm is PGE’s second largest renewable energy project, and MacKay Sposito was proud to be part of it.
MacKay Sposito provided construction inspection for the civil and environmental components of the project, which included the wind turbine footings (each of which was made of approximately 305 cubic yards of concrete reinforced with 25 tons of rebar), conduits, access roads, grounding for the new collector station, a new Operations & Maintenance building, and environmental compliance monitoring.
The aggressive schedule required construction during the winter, which proved especially challenging with the access roads. Crews experienced mucky or frozen ground conditions that complicated subbase preparation. We ensured the roads were built to spec despite the conditions, as there was no room for error given the size of the trucks and cargo that utilized the roads.
The project was online December 15, 2014.