Buckeye Rural Electric Cooperative members in Rutland area of Meigs County should be noticing a significant improvement in their electric service reliability.
BREC has been upgrading and modernizing its equipment in phases, thanks to long-term planning that accommodates necessary improvements in a financially responsible manner. The Rutland substation had reached a point of needing a complete rebuild or replacement due to issues with the existing station power transformers.
The recent upgrade has enabled this station to not only provide a greater level of reliability, but we can now support backfeeding in multiple directions. That means if one substation, or equipment down the line, has an outage, BREC can send power from another substation to those consumers whose power is out. So, if an outage does occur, backfeeding gets the power back on for those consumers a lot faster while repairs are being made.
The substation was built to today’s standards at a total cost of approximately $1.1 million. Rutland substation took approximately four months to demolish and rebuild with two additional months for final testing and commissioning. The BREC owned 34.5kV (34,500 volts) subtransmission system which supplies Rutland substation was recently inspected for reliability and some sections were rebuilt.
It’s never an easy decision to spend our members’ money, so when we do, we make sure it will both improve service reliability and make operations more efficient. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about your service or the investments we’re making in your cooperative.