Everyone talks abstractly about the grid buildout, transmission constraints, and interconnection queues; much like a microwave oven and non-dairy powdered creamer, “no one really knows how it works.” There is an aura of mystery surrounding our electrical grid that energy professionals don’t necessarily discourage.

One of our goals here at Halcyon is to make the opaque transparent. I’ve mentioned previously that after gas plants and data centers, substations are the third-most expensive item added to the grid with regular occurrence. How expensive, exactly?

At least in Pacificorp’s case, $72.6 million for its Shirly Basin Substation. With that, you could install:

• 2 – 525/230kV Transformers 
• 6 – 550KV Breakers 
• 14- 525KV Horizontal Mount Group Operated Switches 
• 2 – 525KV Horizontal Mount Group Operated Switches, W/ Motor Operator 
• 1 – 525kV Line Reactor 
• 1 – 525kV Cap Bank • 1 – 27’x50’ Control House 
• 6 – 242 KV Breakers 
• 11 – 230KV Horizontal Mount Group Operated Switches 
• 3 – 230KV Vertical Mount Group Operated Switches 
• 1 – 230kV CAP Bank

This is the type of information that will live in Halcyon’s forthcoming New Substation Tracker (NSST) Data Subscription. NSST links projects from utility and RTO transmission expansion plans to underlying dockets to understand the cost, timeline, and equipment necessary to bring new substations online.

This is valuable information to a lot of different stakeholders:

Equipment manufacturers & suppliers (transformers, breakers, switchgear)

• • Demand forecasting: What are utilities actually ordering? Where?
  • Pricing intelligence: What are peers paying for comparable equipment?
  • Sales targeting: Which utilities have big substation buildouts coming?

Developers (generation, storage, data centers, industrial load)

• • Interconnection reality check: Is the grid infrastructure actually being built to support my project?
  • Timeline planning: When will capacity come online in my target area?
  • Cost benchmarking: If I'm paying for network upgrades, what should I expect?

Investors & financial analysts

• • Utility capex due diligence: Where is money actually flowing?
  • Supply chain thesis validation: Transformer lead times are a huge bottleneck — this data shows what's in the pipeline
  • Infrastructure deployment tracking: Is buildout keeping pace with demand growth?

Utilities can use this information for procurement benchmarking and hyperscalers can better understand where real infrastructure development is happening and when.

At launch, we’ll cover new substations and projects at existing substations in the Western Interconnection. We plan to expand next to ERCOT and then the Eastern Interconnection after. If you’d like to learn more about our New Substation Tracker or get notifications when it releases, fill out this quick form.

(As a reminder, we offer several other Data Subscriptions: Gas Power Plant Tracker; Large Load Tariff Tracker; Battery Energy Storage Systems Tracker; and Rate Case/Cost-of-Capital Tracker. We also offer discounted pricing via an “all-access” promotional plan currently available - reach out now to learn more and take advantage of this limited-time offer.)

These data subscriptions are dense, by design. If you think looking at a crowded spreadsheet is tough, just imagine being an analyst that has to manually comb through hundreds of filings, each thousands of pages long, to extract this information manually. 

Since we launched our first Data Subscription six months ago, we’ve published 19 total updates across four recurring series, as well as a few particularly timely and important one-offs   such as our FERC ANOPR Comment Analysis. Our data science team and energy subject-matter experts have built a well-oiled machine to productize these data subscriptions, and while we don’t want to give too much away, for those who are technically inclined or fellow energy nerds, here’s a glimpse under the hood from our Head of Data Science, Sam Steyer, on how we’d go about building a very simplified version of a much more basic data set. Enjoy!