The North Central Electric Cooperative Board of Trustees approved a $15 million, four-year construction workplan at its August meeting that features a new substation and a fiber optic communications system. This workplan will be the main supporting document for the cooperative’s loan application to be filed later this year with the Rural Utilities Service of the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

Engineering and Services Manager Patrick Pifher, with assistance from Engineer and Planning Manager Lynn Hill, PE, covered the highlights of the plan with the board. The main objective of the workplan is to enhance system reliability by reducing the frequency of outages and to reduce outage exposure to the greatest number of members. In addition, the workplan addresses facilities located in the cooperative’s growth areas, especially in the commercial sector.

The major expenditure in the workplan calls for a projected $2 million substation to be built at Township Road 107 and County Road 16 in eastern Wyandot County’s Tymochtee Township. The Adrian substation, as it will be known, will be North Central’s 13th substation and will give the cooperative some much-needed operational flexibility. The Adrian substation will alleviate some of the load on the Carey substation, Pifher explained, plus accommodate the growing demand of the National Lime and Stone Co. near Carey.

Currently, the cooperative can only backfeed the Carey substation from one direction. “Backfeeding” is especially important when the cooperative loses transmission service from American Electric Power (AEP). Using the cooperative’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition computer system, the operations department can reroute power from an adjacent substation as long as the adjacent substation is served by a different transmission line. One of the operations department’s primary goals at North Central is to “balance loads” to keep the substation’s capacity at or near 50 percent. That required some substation boundaries to be changed.

Another key substation improvement that also gives the cooperative flexibility will be the installation of threeway transmission switches at its Bascom, Jackson and Risingsun substations. Pifher said transmission lines that supply substations can be fed from two directions on the AEP transmission grid.

“Three-way switches on the transmission tap allow the substation to be fed from either direction. If the transmission line goes out from the normal feed, AEP can typically back feed their line and pick our substation load up from the other direction. This can help during substation outages due to loss of transmission,” Pifher said.

The workplan also calls for construction of a fiber optic ring with a larger bandwidth that will provide a secure communications path. “This is more reliable than radio and wireless communications,” Pifher said.

The plan is to start with the two substations closest to the cooperative’s office — St. Stephens in Venice Township and New Washington. Throughout the course of the workplan, the cooperative will build and rebuild about 51 miles of three-phase line and about five miles of single-phase line. The total projected cost of these line rebuilds is $5.25 million.

Financing the workplan, especially in times of negative growth, is also an important consideration. Since 2007, the number of meters has declined from a high of 9,760 to 9,649. Pifher and Hill consider this a conservative workplan that can successfully be worked into the annual budget. The plan can be extended from four to six years, if economic conditions warrant.

“It all boils down to what you need to do and what the membership can afford pay for,” North Central General Manager Markus Bryant said. “That is the reason why, for the past few years, we have increased the monthly service charge by a modest $2 a month. That’s how we’re able to maintain a high level of system reliability that our members have come to expect of North Central.”