News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
UCEMC has completed the process of connecting all of its offices and substations.
Operations Manager Joe Skelton said last week they completed the final fiber pull connecting all systems. Skelton said in addition to heightened security, the fiber ring improves reliability.
“It allows us to know when outages occur within seconds,” Skelton said. “And then also enables us to test and restore power remotely and basically have a better visibility of our system and what the customers are experiencing.”
Skelton said UCEMC did every bit of the work in-house. He said the internal ring included over 150 miles of fiber and their linemen cross-trained to work with fiber and complete the installation.
Skelton said the system gives them control of their substations in real time.
“If you go way back, when things went down someone had to drive out after we received a customer call,” Skelton said. “And then we were using DSL and even dial-up to see these electronic devices at the substation.”
Skelton said those old methods might take a minimum of 20 minutes just to arrive on site if someone was close to the substation to respond. He said now, regardless of outage location, they can locate the issue in real time and use diagnostics at the speed of light.
“We’ve got roughly 54,000 customers and they’re all fed off of our substation,” Skelton said. “So this affects every one of them.”
