Watt’s Up: MVEC Construction Update
By Dan Schulte, Operations Director
In the April Watt’s Up blog, we covered maintenance at your cooperative. This month, our Operations Director, Dan Schulte, provides an update on construction projects happening in MVEC’s service area.
While construction work takes place all year long, summer is a particularly busy time for our operations crews doing construction projects across our service territory.
In addition to constructing new services and rebuilding services throughout our service area, the crews also have two major construction projects they are undertaking this summer:
1. Highway 13 project: MVEC is rebuilding an 8-mile section of Highway 13 where we are relocating line further off the road to allow for wider ditches. This project came at the request of the State of Iowa to support their road rebuilding efforts in Delaware County.
2. Jones County project: Our crews are moving a mile and a half of line to accommodate road work along 215th Avenue south of Anamosa.
For typical new service and rebuild projects, MVEC’s staking and engineering departments review member requests and tackle those projects as they come in and resources allow. When it comes to larger projects that support road rebuilds, MVEC works with the State and Counties several years in advance to plan for those projects.
Last year’s summer construction season was dry and accommodating to our crews. This year, Mother Nature has certainly provided some challenges with weather. The severe conditions have not only created storm cleanup work for the linemen, they have prevented crews from accessing off-road areas that are too wet for large trucks to navigate. Our crews remain focused on completing both large road construction line relocates before the contractors move in to begin the roadwork portion of the projects.
Some construction projects entail MVEC crews installing additional sectionalizing devices which have been helpful during storm restoration—we are able to isolate damaged areas faster which results in more members getting power back on quickly. This process used to be very manual and would require linemen out in the field to investigate. Now, we can put our heads together in the operations center and quickly identify outage areas to restore them.
In addition to accommodating road projects, MVEC also completes several system upgrade projects each year which “harden” the system. These project areas are identified in the Cooperative’s Engineering Work Plan and typically consist of the replacement of aging facilities, upgrading areas that are seeing higher growth, or adding smart grid functionality to our distribution feeders. Today’s design standards and the increased loads across the service territory require bigger wire with poles located closer together. When we make those upgrades, not only can our system handle larger loads, it is stronger and can weather storms.