BrightRidge Cuts Ribbon on 31st Substation to Improve System Reliability

JONESBOROUGH – BrightRidge officials cut the ribbon on its 31^st substation Wednesday morning at 10:30 a.m., placing a $4.45 million facility into service to substantially reduce the burden on heavily-loaded circuits serving West Johnson City and Jonesborough.

The substation, located at 1123 East Main Street in Jonesborough, enhances the system’s ability to respond to outages.

“This segment of our system has seen tremendous growth over the past decade,” BrightRidge CEO Jeff Dykes said. “The new Midway substation allows both our Jonesborough and our West substations to shed significant load, providing additional redundancy and flexibility in servicing residents and some of our largest customers, including Veterans Affairs Mountain Home, Johnson City Medical Center, and East Tennessee State University.”

Prior to the commissioning of the Midway substation, the heaviest loaded circuit in the system was fed from the Jonesborough substation, backed up by the second heaviest loaded circuit out of West substation.

“Midway was designed to improve overall system reliability by giving us additional flexibility in shifting load during times of high demand, particularly in winter months,” Dykes said. “With Midway online under peak loading conditions, we now have much greater flexibility to restore power in case of any issue on these two formerly heavily loaded circuits.”

The new system also allows electric load from Walters primary to be shifted to West primary, providing better load flow to the transmission system.

“It is our commitment to continue providing the best possible service at the lowest possible cost,” Dykes said. “Every year, we reinvest more than $10 million in cash — not debt borrowing — into upkeep and expansion of our electric distribution system. Along with this new substation, we also thoroughly upgraded our substation control room at our main office, bringing state-of-the-art control infrastructure to our system.”