With No Powerlines, What Powers Downtown Mpls.?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- In towering office buildings and on bustling streets, electricity is the lifeblood of downtown Minneapolis commerce.
But a simple glance around reveals no signs of powerlines or an electric grid.
Joel Limoges is an electrical engineer for Xcel Energy, and he oversees the downtown Minneapolis grid. He recently took a WCCO-TV camera into the bowels of downtown to reveal, for the first time, the elaborate underground power network that keeps the area humming.
He escorted us into one of five underground substations placed around downtown. It is in the substations where 115,000 volts of electricity goes from transformer to distribution lines.
The power is then carried on smaller underground conductors for distribution into every office cubicle, store and corner restaurant.
"Think of each one of these as essentially a large panel, like you have in your house," Limoges said. "In these are breakers that are protecting each circuit, should it fail."
The power is monitored from the underground substations as it flows through insulated conduits buried under the streets. Keeping tabs on each circuit is a twinkle of switches, gauges and meters lining the cavernous concrete room.
"This entire sub is monitored from a remote location and very seldom are there people here," Limoges said.
Xcel's underground substations will soon get more high tech, as work begins on a $17-million equipment upgrade. Some of the equipment in the large sub dates back to the early 1960s.
"The downtown areas, like the sidewalks, go from building wall to curb wall. There's just no place for our equipment and that's why we devised this," Limoges said.
In the essential world of providing electricity, it is all about energy reliability -- in a design that is completely out of sight.
"And that's just the way we like it," he said.
