Planning approval has been granted for stage two of Sydney’s $1 billion CBD electricity upgrade with work to commence on the new substations in just 11 days time.

The $800 million second stage, also known as CityGrid, will see a ring of electricity substations connected by underground tunnels built around the Sydney CBD - much of it deep below the city’s surface.

The NSW Government’s $1 billion infrastructure upgrade for Sydney will make the city’s power supply the most secure in the country - on par with the best in the world including New York and London.

Six kilometres of underground tunnels will be built to connect to four new or upgraded zone substations. They will connect with the City North Zone Substation and City West Cable Tunnel already under construction to form a complete ring of electrical infrastructure around the city.

The Minister for Planning had granted approval for both the CityGrid concept plan application as well as the $125 million Belmore Park Zone Substation project application.

Preliminary work has already started off site for this major new zone substation opposite Belmore Park and it’s expected EnergyAustralia will start work on-site later this month.

The City North Zone substation alone will provide enough electricity to power up 25 per cent of our CBD. It will be the biggest substation built in the Sydney CBD.

It’s an eight storey zone substation. It will contain five zone transformers, 105 circuit breakers and 20km of protection cable. It will be connected to customers via 96 separate 11,000 volt cables.

The City West Cable tunnel will contain up to 20km of 132,000 volt electricity transmission cables to transport power to the zone substation – protected by dedicated cable tunnels. They will be locked away from any potential cable dig ins that caused two outages earlier in the year in the Sydney CBD.

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