Nov 28, 2025
Preventing Outages with Substation Capacity and Redundancy
Widespread power outages can be crippling to densely populated cities with inadequate infrastructure. Just ask residents of New York City. They have experienced many area-wide power outages over the last decade. The region's primary utility, Con Edison, is investing billions in new capacity and redundancy to prevent outages in the future.
Their most recent project involves building the new Gateway Substation in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Once completed, the substation will power over 52,000 structures in Central and East Brooklyn. The system will get twenty-eight miles of new underground cabling along with the substation itself.
In addition to helping prevent wine spread outages, the new substation will meet new capacity demands projected to reach 16% over the next 10 years. For Con Edison, it is all about increasing capacity and introducing new redundancy.
The Capacity Question
The capacity question is almost always top-of-mind when considering system upgrades and new installations. Thanks to the digital age, the world is consuming ever more power by way of data centers, the IoT, AI, and more. Insufficient capacity leads to outages. So first and foremost, we need the capacity the digital age requires.
New substations increase capacity at the local level. Installing them in densely populated areas makes sense. That said, few should be surprised by the new substation Con Edison is planning in Brooklyn. Increasing capacity where population densities are expected to grow is smart.
Localized Grid Resilience
There is another consideration that goes hand-in-hand with the capacity question: localized grid resilience. By giving the Carnarsie neighborhood its own substation, local homes and businesses are less dependent on substations that could be dozens of miles away. They are less likely to experience an area-wide outage that could otherwise shut down entire boroughs.
Building Network Redundancy Into the System
Increasing capacity is one way to prevent widespread power outages. Another is to build redundancy into the system. Today's substations are engineered with interconnected network architectures that automatically balance loads and reroute power during failures.
In other words, the entire local grid doesn't need to fail even if one part of it does. Con Edison's new Gateway facility creates that sort of redundancy with a high-voltage node that integrates into the utility's transmission line and substation network. This network gives the substation a variety of alternate supply paths across multiple boroughs.
Mitigating Environmental Risks
Given the importance of redundancy, it is necessary for Con Edison to also mitigate environmental risks. That is the point of burying twenty-eight miles of transmission cables underground. Underground installation protects critical lines from storms, heatwaves, and other surface-level damage. The underground lines are also less prone to flooding.
Protecting It All With Digital Technologies
Increased capacity and redundancy are proven concepts for preventing widespread power outages. But even the best and most robust substation projects need modern control systems for management purposes.
The modern substation is equipped with real-time digital sensors and automated fault isolation systems. A combination of software and sensors constantly monitors for any type of fault. If a feeder line or transformer goes down, the software automatically reroutes power to prevent a cascading fault scenario.
Digital monitoring and fault isolation require robust communication networks that can also detect their own anomalies and isolate them. And of course, everything needs to work at blazing-fast speeds so that customers never experience even a flickering light bulb.
What Con Edison is doing throughout New York's five boroughs is a good example of how increased capacity and better redundancy can prevent widespread power outages. Hopefully, New York's history of outages will eventually be a thing of the past.
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