RUMFORD — Work continues on a $5.26 million electricity substation on the former Railroad Street next to NewPage Corp.

NewPage spokesman Tony Lyons said Wednesday that the Interconnect Project, as it is called, “is a substation that allows two streams of electrical power to be separated as they go out into the grid.”

“When we sold our hydropower facilities to Brookfield Renewable Power, there was a requirement in the sale to separate the two power streams,” he said.

“Of course, up until then, all of the electricity that was produced by the hydro came into the mill, and then the extra was passed out of the mill on a single line.”

According to the project’s site plan review and shoreland zoning permit in the Rumford Town Office, the estimated cost of the project is $5.27 million.

As part of the sale agreement, NewPage will install the new interconnection substation and control house that will take electricity produced by six hydro generators into it and connect directly to the Central Maine Power Co. grid.

The permit states that the new substation is required to step up the power from the generator voltage of 11.5 kilovolts to the power distribution voltage of 115 kilovolts, along with all of the power protection systems required to connect to the power grid.

Now that Brookfield’s hydro facility is producing its own electricity, Lyons said, it had to have a separate line leaving the mill so that Brookfield’s power was separate from the paper mill’s power.

“It was a requirement of the sale that we had to negotiate and finalize the design with CMP, which happened late last year, and then the construction of that Interconnect Project started, and so we’ve been working on it ever since,” Lyons said.

The Interconnect Substation will look similar to the substation atop Falls Hill.

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