Reliability: The switching station will provide modern protection upgrades to avoid outages impacting thousands of customers on multiple substations when problems occur. With the former technology of the Belfair Substation, when a fault occurs on the transmission side, the only protection is for BPA to drop the feed between Shelton and Bremerton and Mason PUD 3 loses transmission to five substations at once. This causes widespread power outages to over 17,000 customers and greatly delays restoration times.
Capacity: PUD 3 has not able to provide the power to meet the large requests and short timeline development opportunities that have been proposed over the past several years. The Belfair Electrical Upgrades Project have been opening the Belfair manufacturing and industrial area to commercial growth, providing significant economic benefits to all the surrounding communities (including Belfair, Shelton, Grapeview, Allyn, Tahuya peninsula, and more). In recent years, the Economic Development Council (EDC) of Mason County, had to turn away multiple recruitment opportunities due to lack of electrical infrastructure capacity. This resulted in an estimated loss of hundreds of potential new jobs.
BPA Transmission Tap: The project also provides an opportunity to expand access to the Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) high voltage transmission system for future load growth in the area. BPA has restricted any future taps along this transmission corridor, so the only way to provide additional capacity for customers is through a new switching station like the one completed in summer 2026.