TVA will relocate their operations systems and upgrades the technology within in about two years.
The brain of TVA is relocating from Downtown Chattanooga to Georgetown, Tennessee. The new operations center will allow TVA to quick detect any disruptions across their 80,000 square foot mile system and get ahead of serve weather to keep your power on.
When the operations center is complete, Aaron Melda with TVA said it will be the most secure complex in the Tennessee Valley.
“It’s designed to be impervious to weather, so an F5 class tornado won’t do a thing to this building. From a natural disaster standpoint we could sustain up to a six on the Richter scale earthquake, a direct ballistic attack and it also has the ability to capability to be impervious to electromagnetic pulse or geomagnetic disturbance,” Melda said.
While severe weather and natural disasters may not impact the new operations center, it will have a impact on the people who live across the Tennessee Valley.
TVA’s Shannon Brown said the new technology that will help their operations team quickly plan and get people out to fix or inspect the problem.
“I know that I have this many customers out in this area, this substation, this substation and this substation has been affected so where do we start when we start doing system restoration. We know immediately where we have lost customers and where we need to focus and what routes we need to focus on in restoration to be able to get those customers their power back,” Brown said.
For decades, Holiday power loads during Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons have been one of the hardest things to predict in the Tennessee Valley.
Brown said TVA will no longer need to push out addition assets and power to prepare in advance.
“Now, instead of having to do a prediction days ahead of time for that forecast and committing TVA’s assets days in advance we are going to be able to get that feedback in quicker and real time. We can adjust our generation much more quickly and be able to service folks that are putting turkeys in the oven or servicing that pop tart load on Saturday morning in real time,” Brown said.
The upgrade is like going from a flip phone to the latest iphone.
“Every two seconds our system updates and pulls 13,000 locations and gives us real time representation of what is happening on TVA’s system. That is everything from megavolt output, voltage output, mega wide output and where and what directions those flows are going,” Brown said.
