Tennessee Tech has added a redundant electrical utility feed designed to keep campus power running during outages and reduce the risk of blackouts that disrupt student life.
Tennessee Tech Associate Vice President of Facilities and Business Services Dan Warren said the new system gives the campus a backup electricity source that automatically activates if the primary feed fails. Warren said the upgrade replaces an older generator-based system that no longer met campus demand.
“It provides us a backup source of electricity that would basically make it to where the students wouldn’t even notice it if we did have a power outage, because we would switch from our primary feed to our secondary feed,” Warren said. “The reason that we installed that is because we formerly had four large generators that would provide us with backup power in the event of a blackout, but as our campus grew, the eight megawatts of generating power that we did have at the time were no longer sufficient.”
Warren said adding more generators was considered but proved too costly, leading the university to adopt a dual-feed system similar to one he worked with earlier in his career. He said the campus switchgear now handles the transfer automatically without interrupting operations.
“So that if we do lose power on our primary, the campus switchgear that we’ve recently installed is going to automatically transfer over, provide power to the campus, and we won’t miss a beat,” Warren said.
Warren said students experienced brownouts in the past when generators could not carry the full electrical load, especially during high-demand periods. He said the new system is designed to meet both current and future campus needs.
“In the past, we would suffer from what are called brownouts, where our generators didn’t have enough capacity to carry the entire load adequately,” Warren said. “That is now a thing of the past. The system that we have is set up properly for today as well as tomorrow.”
The added reliability becomes more critical during winter weather, when hundreds of students remain on campus. Warren said maintaining heat and basic services during storms is a top priority.
“We anticipate between six hundred to one thousand students remaining on campus, and it’s our responsibility to provide for them,” Warren said. “It’s hard to keep a dorm warm without electricity, so that’s a top priority on our list of things that we need to make sure we have a backup plan for.”
Warren said the redundant feed protects essential student services such as dining and housing operations. He said the campus functions much like a small city, with added responsibility for residents.
“We are basically a city all to ourselves, but the difference between us and a regular city is we have to feed our occupants, our residents,” Warren said. “So the primary thing that we’re trying to do is keep them warm and keep them fed, and the backup power provides us with the ability to do so.”