New Ephrata Service Center Project

History

The current Ephrata Service Center was constructed in the mid-1970s, and other structures have been built on the site in years after. The current facility was not built to support the services Grant PUD has grown to provide for our customers in the last 45+ years and would require expensive upgrades. Grant PUD conducted an intensive planning and analysis of our future facility needs to keep up with and meet increasing customer demand and organizational growth over the next 30 years. Grant PUD identified the most economical plan was to replace the existing Ephrata Service Center with a new facility.

Benefits

The new Ephrata Service Center will replace the aging and inadequate existing Ephrata Service Center. The new Ephrata Service Center will be built with the goal of providing long-term value to our customers. It will provide Grant PUD crews and support staff with the facilities they need to safely, efficiently, and adequately respond to both day-to-day operations and maintenance work, and emergent outage needs.

Details

The new Ephrata Service Center will:

• Replace the current outdated and insufficient Ephrata Service Center.
• Be located in an area that is more dispersed than the present service center, which is near a major railroad crossing, the busy Ephrata Middle School, and active grain elevators. These often create traffic backups that slow our mobilization efforts.
• Have increased physical capacity to keep up with growing demands for power and fiber service in Grant County. 
• Be compliant with federal and state requirements for public service buildings, including the highest resiliency to natural disasters and other business risks.
• Be strategically located to more efficiently respond to outages, service calls and new connection requests.
• Have adequate warehousing and storage space to effectively store and protect high-value equipment and material from extreme weather conditions. 
• Have the latest safety features to protect employees working in maintenance shops, warehouses, training rooms and office spaces. 
• Be designed to provide greater security for Grant PUD’s critical power system operations and equipment.