MEIGS COUNTY, Tenn — Tennessee Valley Authority is making improvements to make sure blackouts like the ones seen in 2022, don't happen again. This includes building a new operations center.
TVA's new state-of-the-art system operation center is making a 45-minute move from downtown Chattanooga to Georgetown.
"A very common move for security reasons is to locate a facility like this outside of an urban center," said Aaron Melda, senior VP of Transmission and Power Supply.
This new operations center will be open in some capacity by this fall. By the fall of 2026, this will be the primary operations center.
"This is literally the brains of the TVA system," said Melda. "So 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 will be controlled from this facility."
TVA leaders said the new facility also has enhanced security. The building itself is designed to withstand threats like natural disasters.
"When it's operational, it will be the most secure complex in the valley," said Melda. "Several reasons. 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 six on the Richter scale earthquake, a direct ballistic attack. It also has the capability to be impervious to electromagnetic pulse or geomagnetic disturbance. So, a very secure facility for the brains of the system. In fact, if there were an issue, this would be the first light you would see back on in the valley."
Melda said design features like a stand-alone facility that's separate from the corporate non-essential functions, controls with the latest tools, and security makes sure the TVA can rebound quickly or avoid disruption from weather events or cyber security threats.
He said the center will improve power reliability and lower costs for its 10 million customers across seven states.
"Day one, when this goes into operation, we will be able to save our customers $100 million a year," said Melda. "So a $300 million investment that you're standing in three years will have paid back and will be continuing to pay that back over the 50-year life of this facility."
He said the new center will also meet the needs based on growth in the region.
"The technology that's going into the center will be able to increase that reliability significantly," said Melda. "You'll be able to predict weather better, you'll have better capability to predict consumer behavior and demand. And we'll have greater operational capability to dispatch the diverse fleet that we have. Reliability is about keeping your lights on all the time. Resiliency is those very few times that something happens that takes your lights out. How quickly can we get it back on? And the technology that's going in here will be able to predict, you know, all sorts of natural disasters before they occur so that we can be prepared to get that power back on as quickly as we can."
Melda said TVA visited different control centers to find the best technology.
"We did a benchmarking effort over about a two-year period where we visited in the neighborhood of 30 different control centers," said Melda. "Most of those utility industries, but several of those in different industries, in fact, a couple in the three letter agencies that are out of DC that have some pretty advanced technology. So all the best practices that we know of in in advanced technology are coming here. And that's why this will when it goes into operation be the most advanced in the U.S."
According to Shannon Brown, the manager of balancing authority, TVA is also upgrading to the Energy Management System, or EMS.
"We have upgraded to the latest state-of-the-art Energy Management System and servers. So we'll be able to see things granular in quicker detail," said Brown. "Almost immediate, almost in an exact real-time every two seconds."
Brown said TVA has about 16,000 miles of transmission lines. She says the agency is testing technology that updates data in real-time and will be able to predict changes to the power load quickly.
"We're gonna be able to bring in input from our, our data vendors and also incorporate feedback from real-time load usage to do a better prediction on how quickly we're gonna have load changes on TVA system," said Brown.
She said the new operator room will also have a well-thought-out layout.
"One of the other benefits of this room is that we will have a much broader view in real time of a lot of our resources that are now inverter-based," said Brown. "Not just not just our coal, not just our gas, not just our nuclear, but a lot of different inverter-based resources such as batteries, solar renewables such as wind. We will be able to keep those in the forefront of our focus in real-time with the new EMS and get that feedback even quicker from those facilities. And the other thing that the new system is going to allow us to do is to be able to control those facilities quicker whereas we may have had to make a phone call to a specific site to have them adjust their output."
Another feature of the new facility is a specific room for operator simulation training.
The manager of operations training said the simulations are based on real events, or preparing for things that could happen like cyber security threats.
We pull off of real-time events that we've seen happen on our system," said Joel Wise, the manager of operations training. "One thing about working rotating shifts is it may happen on one shift and that group of operators gets to experience it, but the other operators, they may go several years and never experience a similar event."
He said it's important the operators are prepared, with no impact on the actual power grid.
"All of the 13,000 data points that go into our real-time control system, our SCADA, which is system control and data acquisition, and EMS," said Wise. "But that's the real-time control system that our operators in the control center use to monitor and control our system. All of those data points are then also fed into our model that runs our simulator. So what we're able to see, everything in our simulator, that our operators see in real-time. So right now what they're doing is actually looking at some of the one-line diagrams and, working through that and practicing. If I need to switch a transmission line out, these are the breakers I would open."