Major investment planned in new Te Kūiti Substation

1 December 2020

The Lines Company (TLC) announced today major investment in a new larger substation at Waitete will power generations to come.

Te Kūiti’s growing demand for electricity will be met by The Lines Company’s multi-million-dollar investment in a purpose-built zone substation at Waitete.

“The region is seeing an increase in population and larger industrial loads, resulting in overall higher demand on TLC’s Waitete substation,” said TLC Group CE Sean Horgan.

“This project is part of our wider investment programme over the next five years which will see us spend around $85m targeted at improving the reliability of the service we provide to our customers and ensure we are prepared for regional growth”.

The Waitete project is the largest new-build outlay by TLC since the 1950’s, the 33/11kV zone substation project will see the construction of two switch rooms with state-of-the-art equipment installed including switchgear, transformers, cabling, and protection and control equipment.

“The new build will deliver fifty-percent more capacity and greatly improve reliability of supply throughout Te Kūiti, future proofing the asset for generations to come,” said general manager of Network, Mike Fox.

“Boosting avaliable output will provide much needed future capacity from our second largest substation by customer count.”

As well as increasing capacity, the new substation will see a safer working environment for our team through the use of modern equipment and safety by design principles.

The new substation will be located on TLC land across the road from the current Waitete Road Depot. The project has recently been granted consent by the Waitomo District Council with site works scheduled to commence late 2020, installation of equipment in Q2 of next year, and supply livened in Q3 2021.

The transformers from the existing substation will be redeployed on TLC’s network to further improve capacity and reliability for customers elsewhere on the network.