A fourth primary substation is planned for Redstone Arsenal to help handle its growing electrical demand, and several other construction projects across the installation are planned or underway.

The project to build a new substation, to be located at the southwest corner of Mills and Patton roads, is in the award phase, said Kaela Lauren McGuire Hamby, the MILCON branch chief in the master planning division of the Garrison’s Directorate of Public Works. “Once the selection is made, the project will take approximately 1,000 days to construct.”

This facility will be Redstone’s southernmost primary substation, connecting to a new Tennessee Valley Authority 161-kilovolt power line at the Arsenal’s boundary on Buxton Road, Hamby said. According to the TVA, the power line will stretch less than five miles and be built using primarily single-pole steel structures on a new 100-foot-wide right of way.

This is TVA’s third power feed to serve Redstone Arsenal.

Redstone Arsenal is expecting a 76 megawatt increase in load by 2030.

“This (substation) provides us a diverse path from the other two TVA feeds,” said David Washburn, a DPW electrical engineer and the project manager for the substation work. “We have two feeds coming in on the north end of the post, this feed’s coming in on the south. In the event a tornado came across north or south, it’s unlikely that both feeds would be affected.”

The substation is a Military Construction, Army or MCA project being executed through the Corps of Engineers’ Mobile district.

“This capacity will feed all our electrical load for the foreseeable future,” Washburn said.

Another MCA project that is being executed by the Corps of Engineers’ Mobile district is a general-purpose warehouse of about 110,000 square feet. It will “consolidate storage missions from 14 existing old wood-and-brick warehouses into one facility divided in ‘cages’ so that individual tenants have secure space for their storage,” Hamby said.

Nine tenants are impacted by the project, according to Halee Holloway, the project manager for the warehouse project. The structure will provide vertical storage capacity.

Construction, which starts this month, is expected to be completed in about 810 days, Hamby said.

First, the new warehouse will be built, then tenants will move in and clear out their old facility before demolition of the 14 warehouses begins.

Three Defense Intelligence Agency projects on the Missile and Space Intelligence Center campus at Redstone are under construction or planned.

The contract for Phase I, the Material Exploitation Center, was awarded in December 2022 and is expected to be completed in the spring of 2026, Hamby said.

Construction of Phase II, the Modeling Analysis Computing Exploitation, is expected to start later this summer and be completed in approximately 2 ½ years

A new substation at Toftoy and Fowler roads, which will support the MSIC campus, is under construction and is about 27% complete, Hamby said. Completion is expected in the summer of 2027.

“This work also includes a gas line along Fowler and Mill roads,” she said.

“The gas line will provide gas capacity for Phase II,” Washburn said.