Faced with an aggressive in-service date for their solar facility Felina Solar Park, El Paso Electric teamed with Beta Engineering to design and build the interconnecting switchyard. Together, Beta and EPE completed the critical switchyard project six months ahead of schedule.

The Wicked Switchyard project (named after a line in Marty Robbins’ song “El Paso”) built on the success of the Verde project, another 115kV solar interconnect switchyard Beta and EPE completed a year earlier. The teams applied lessons learned from Verde to Wicked to improve project efficiency and quality.

Beta identified opportunities to expedite tasks for EPE and prioritized proactive communication and collaboration throughout the project, including re-sequencing construction activities. One way Beta accelerated the schedule was by coordinating with the solar park team to create a construction plan that allowed Beta to use access roads through the solar site so switchyard construction could start before the access road to the switchyard was completed.

Video: Felina Solar Park is EPE’s first owned and operated solar facility. Hear from EPE’s project management, engineering, and operations teams how it supports the El Paso community‍

The Wicked project demonstrates how proactive collaboration and teamwork help utilities like EPE expand their infrastructure and bring reliable, community-focused clean energy online faster.