TVA nearing completion of new operations center

GEORGETOWN, Tenn. (WDEF)- Providing energy to a seven state region is a large task.

Especially with unpredictable weather and rapid population growth, the job of the T-V-A only grows more complicated.

Georgetown has long been a quiet community at the Highway 58/60 interchange on the Hamilton/Meigs County line.

However, it will soon be home to TVA’s brand new System Operations Center, which looks to transform the efficiency of the agency.

Aaron Melda, TVA’s Senior Vice President for  Transmission & Power Supply, said, “This is literally the brains of the TVA system. 16,000 miles of transmission, 500 substations, and you can think of substations like those breaker panels in your garages where we can move electricity around, and then hundreds of power plants that we control from this center.”

 The $300 million operations center is built to be the most secure facility for the agency.

“It’s designed to be impervious to weather. So F-5 class tornado? Won’t do a thing to this building. From a natural disaster standpoint, we could sustain up to a 6 Richter scale earthquake, a direct ballistic attack, and it also has the capability to be impervious to electromagnetic pulses or geomagnetic disturbance,” said Melda.

 Up to 40 operators at any given time on the main operations floor are going to be using real time data from this seven state region to help keep the lights on.

“For example, your Thanksgiving, your Christmas, all those Christmas lights going out, all those turkeys going in the oven. Now, instead of having to do a prediction days ahead, forecasting and committing TVA’s assets days in advance, we’re going to be able to get that feedback in quicker realtime, and so we can adjust much more quickly to be able to service folks putting turkeys in the oven and servicing that Pop Tart load in real time,” said Shannon Brown, TVA’s Balancing Authority Manager.

Despite its large cost, TVA expects this facility to save our region money and energy resources.

Melda said, “We’ve got all of these assets that we deploy on the top of the hour, because of the technology that we have. So we’re looking across the hour, and our operators decide, I need to put another gas plant on, or I need to take some solar offline, or I need to put etc. The new system will be capable of doing that every five minutes. Because of that granularity, we expect to save $100 million in fuel savings.”

The complex will feature an on-site training center, of which operators required to do continuous training every seven weeks.

The project started in 2020 and is projected to be complete by Fall 2026.