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Lee Onsager: The NV Energy On-line Project was a proposed power line from southern Nevada
to northern Nevada and that power line needed communications for protection and control
of the power grid.
David Hulinsky: NV Energy had to tie Reno, Nevada, and Las Vegas, Nevada, their two networks
together that was over 500 miles long and had to cross the Nevada Mountains that consisted
of 10,000 feet in elevation. This network was going to be used to support a major transmission
kk grid that was going to interconnect the western United States and provide power to
millions of users, users that consisted of residential, business, and industrial type
users.
Lee Onsager: Black & Veatch provided innovation by modeling over 500 microwave paths to kind
of determine the best path, the best mountaintops to use to reduce the amount of infrastructure
we had to add because where we built this power line there wasn't a lot of infrastructure.
We had to add power lines, we had to add roads; we added sites on top of 15-16 mountains so
we added sites at about 16 mountaintops where we had no infrastructure before.
David Hulinsky: Once the design was done and completed, Black & Veatch recommended that
the network be staged and fully installed within a testing facility. This made it easier
for NV Energy to actually implement the network when it was delivered to the site; having
it fully staged and tested to ensure that this network was actually meeting the reliability and availability requirements.
Lee Onsager: It was more than just microwave; it was microwave and fiber-optic communications
systems. We were talking over 500 miles end to end, and trying to trouble shoot across
those great distances is nearly impossible. So having all of that assembled and tested
beforehand was a great benefit toward getting the final equipment installation.
David Hulinsky: It's an engineer's dream to be able to go through the planning stages
all the way through the implementation and see it from beginning to end, but to then
to work very closely with a great partner, such as NV Energy, in order to implement this
network has been nothing but a pleasure and has bee n a great opportunity not only for
me, but for the entire Black & Veatch team.