A single policy change in Bonneville Power Administration’s (BPA) Transmission Services reduced supply chain lead times from eight months to weeks and cut costs by more than a third.
The change, removing the long-standing requirement for stamping copper cores of transmission wires with a “BPA” impression, is now touted as a major success by BPA since taking effect in December 2023.
The decision to leave stamping behind came after Transmission’s Engineering Applications and Standards team, in partnership with Supply Chain and Physical Security departments, inspected the requirement through BPA’s Quality Management process. Once a common industry practice, wire stamping existed as a theft deterrent at substations for many years. BPA’s Physical Security team used the stamps to track stolen wires being sold to metal recyclers in the region.
Tracking these stamped copper wires required heavy coordination with metal recyclers across the agency’s service territory, as stolen wires are typically melted down within 36 hours into scrap metal. For tracking to be effective, BPA needed to ensure metal recyclers across the Northwest recognized the stamp and realized they had stolen wires.
Kevin West, a physical security specialist for BPA’s east region, said the practice of stamping was not a time-effective security option, often consuming resources for relatively underwhelming results.
“The stamp on the inner copper wire is applied about every 36 inches, so when someone brings it into a recycler who is not well-versed in that information, they wouldn’t even know that it could be our wire,” West said.
Over time, BPA Physical Security began to focus their efforts on more advanced measures and industry standards. With more modern, preventative security measures such as security cameras and hardened fences now installed at substations, BPA says there is essentially no longer a consistent need to track stamped wires for security purposes.
“Unless a criminal act rose to such a significant damage level for the Inspecter General to take notice, partner with us and expend their resources, our focus has not been on actively tracking down metal theft since about 2008,” said West. “That was the time we shifted our focus on compliance and bigger fish.”
“We watched delivery times go from around 45 days to eight months or longer,” said Craig. “That was a significant issue, especially for how much we use that cable.”
Since the requirement was removed last year, BPA says it not only saw a significant decrease in lead times, but cost as well, with the average price-per-foot for copper wire dropping nearly 38% just by removing stamping and custom reeling costs.
