Design, Startup, and Commissioning of a 230 kV - 13.8 kV Substation

As part of an overall system reliability and capacity upgrade, facility management at a major refinery decided to commission site engineers to design, startup, and commission a grass roots 230 kV-13.8 kV 40 MVA spot network substation. The management directive was to complete a "flawless" startup and commissioning of the substation. A flawless startup was important to management because a functional failure in a main electrical substation was unacceptable. The costs of such a failure could easily exceed the initial costs of the substation and cause significant process equipment damage. It was deemed as cost effective by management and engineering personnel to ensure that the design, construction, and testing of the substation was as thorough as possible. The design was completed by one team and reviewed by the fresh eyes of a completely independent team. The complicated system was checked by the vendor, checked again by the startup team, and then completely checked for functionality at the end user's facility. The testing included the normal functional and secondary injection testing. In addition primary injection was used to test relays and CTs and actual faults to test certain relay functions. This paper briefly outlines the conceptual plan and engineering for the project. The primary focus of this paper is to detail the effort in developing a startup and commissioning plan, factory acceptance testing, and the actual startup and commissioning. This paper reviews each type of test performed during the startup and commissioning, along with the benefits and usefulness it provided. This paper concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned during the testing