TVA plans to transfer its operational systems and upgrade its technology within about two years.
TVA's brainchild is moving from downtown Chattanooga to Georgetown, Tenn. The new operations center will allow TVA to quickly detect disruptions across the 80,000-square-foot system and stay ahead of severe weather to keep power flowing.
TVA's Aaron Melda said the operations center, once completed, will be the safest facility in the Tennessee Valley.
“The building is designed to be weather-proof, so even an F5 tornado will have no effect on the building. In terms of natural disasters, it can withstand earthquakes of up to 6 on the Richter scale, a direct ballistic attack, and has the capacity to withstand electromagnetic pulses and geomagnetic disturbances,” Melda said.
While severe weather and natural disasters may not affect the new operations center, they will affect people living throughout the Tennessee Valley.
TVA's Shannon Brown said the new technology will help operations teams plan faster and dispatch personnel to troubleshoot problems or conduct inspections.
“We have this many customers in this region and we know this substation, this substation, this substation is affected, so as we begin to work on restoring the system, we'll know very quickly where we start, where we've lost customers, where we need to focus, what routes we need to focus on to be able to restore and get power back to our customers,” Brown said.
For decades, holiday power loads during the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons have been some of the most difficult to predict in the Tennessee Valley.
Brown said TVA would not need to provide additional assets or power to prepare in advance.
“Now, instead of making forecasts days in advance and committing TVA assets days in advance, we'll be able to get faster, real-time feedback, adjust generation faster and provide real-time service to the person who has the turkey in the oven or who's churning out Pop Tarts on a Saturday morning,” Brown said.
This upgrade is like going from a flip phone to the latest iPhone.
“Our system updates every two seconds, pulls information from 13,000 locations and gives us a real-time view of what's going on in TVA's system – everything from megavolt output, voltage output, megawide output and where those flows are going and in what direction,” Brown said.
