The Sparta Board of Mayor and Alderman approved over $350,000 in electrical substation upgrades Thursday to improve power reliability.
Mayor Jerry Lowery said the city is working with TVA on a multi-year process to modernize the local power grid. Lowery said the project is expected to take between four and five years to complete as the city waits for necessary components to arrive.
“And literally once this is, when we met with the engineers, they made the statement to us that we will have one of the most reliable electric systems in the nation,” Lowery said. “And so to be able to provide more power for industry or stay available to try to move this forward and expedite it so we can look at maybe four or five years.”
City Administrator Tonya Tindle said the project will be completed in stages, with a new transformer expected to arrive late this year or early next year. The city intends to separate industrial circuits from residential circuits to prevent local outages from impacting manufacturing plants.
“That way they’ll be, they’ll be fed directly from there so nothing that happens through the residential areas will affect them getting a blip or blinks if there’s a fault occurs on the lines,” Tindle said. “We’re going to try to separate some of the industrial circuit from the residential circuit.”
Lowery said the upgrades are necessary because the city is currently nearing the maximum power load capacity for its existing substation infrastructure.
“We’re getting close to max out at our substation on what we’ve got, what our power load is with some of our industries so we’re having to go in and either upsize or we’re going to spread it out into two transformers instead of the ones,” Lowery said. “To save them some money and everything, this is just going to help the reliability rating in the city of Sparta.”
The board approved two separate bids from Siemens Energy totaling $357,870 for power circuit breakers at the substation.
Lowery said industrial reliability is a major factor for the local economy because even a momentary power flicker can cause significant financial losses for manufacturers. Lowery said some local injection molding companies can lose between $56,000 and $60,000 every time the power blinks and shuts down their computers.
“I think it’s going to be better for the residents of Sparta and industry, future industry for Sparta and White County included as well when we get this, when we get this completed and I didn’t want to wait 15 years to get it done,” Lowery said. “I want to get it done in less than five.”
In other business, the board approved the purchase of two pump rotating assemblies from Smith & Loveless for $54,860. Lowry said the equipment will serve as spare pumps for the Walmart and Ed Rogers sewer pump stations.