Implementing a green protocol for transmission substations

The transmission network of CLP covers a variety of rural and urban environment of Kowloon and the New Territories. There is always a demand from the local communities for environmentally friendly power network. Having realized the general concern of the community and being one of the most environmental conscious corporate citizens of Hong Kong, CLP has been taking proactive steps in developing a green substation concept in the new developments including such as developing a prototypical green substation with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and adopting green construction techniques such as low noise piling system and wider use of prefabrication system. Green substation concept is a particularly challenging idea in dense and hybridized urban area like Hong Kong. With the evolution of the green building tool in the construction industry and real estate, there is demand of a similar guideline and protocol for CLP's developments so that all green initiatives can be better coordinated and quantitatively measurable, and the direction for further improvement can be well defined. The protocol, called Green Substation Protocol (GSP), also helps to reconcile some conflicting green initiatives such as visual/noise barrier and natural ventilation. The paper presents the various design and construction considerations peculiar to transmission substations such as noise mitigation, heat dissipation, natural lighting, aesthetics, waste reduction, pollutant reduction, energy saving, sustainability etc and the approaches to resolving all these issues such as computer simulation, graphical approach, design prototype and templates etc. With the introduction of a protocol (GSP) similar to that developed for other types of buildings in Hong Kong, all these green initiatives are categorized into global, local and indoor issues and appropriate weightings are applied before the final score and ranking are given. The implementation plan of GSP is also introduced which includes the procedure of application, auditing approach, ranking criteria and development of guideline and calculation template for assessment. CLP Power has been developing more than ten new transmission substations in the recent years, and about ten more substations will be finished in coming few years. A number of new developed substations were assessed based on the protocol. Scores and rankings were given and compared among those new substations. It was discovered that noise, visual amenity and energy consumption are the major weighed factors of the protocol. GSP also sets the targets of waste reduction which includes the adoption of prefabrication technique and the use of pulverised fuel ash (PFA) in construction. Such targets become an area of improvement for the future development of transmission substations. The paper is concluded with a summary of the protocol and comparison of scores and rankings of some transmission substations.