CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — Approximately 2,300 Mon Power customers in Lost Creek and West Milford will experience an eight hour planned power outage Saturday while the utility company works on improving it infrastructure.
“Hopefully our Mon Power customers can understand that we’re trying to invest resources into improving infrastructure to ultimately to make sure that their electricity is safe and reliable for years to come,” said Todd Meyers, spokesperson for Mon Power’s parent corporation First Energy.
The purpose of the outage goes along with a $20 million regional transmission system upgrade project that will provide more service reliability for over 14,000 customers in Harrison, Lewis and Gilmer Counties.
“With the Marcellus Shale gas industry with compressor stations and some of these new mid-stream processing plants, they use enormous amounts of electricity,” Meyers said. “We also have the existing coal industry. We have growth in Clarksburg and Bridgeport, commercial growth. We need to upgrade our electrical infrastructure to handle all of that.”
Thus far, the project has included the construction of the new Rider Substation near West Milford that features automated circuit breakers and other equipment designed to help maintain proper voltage levels on the grid. Additionally, crews just completed work on a six-mile, 138-kilovolt transmission line that connects the new substation to an existing transmission line near Craigmoor.
During the outage Saturday, crews will be working in two locations on a number of tasks related to the overall project.
One will help energize the new substation –which is expected to be operational in December– with the assistance of the adjacent West Milford Substation.
“We need to put one last power pole right outside the existing and energized substation and we also need to connect it in to the equipment at the existing station,” Meyers said. “To do that safely, of course, we need to turn off the electricity at that substation.”
Simultaneously, work will be done to upgrade the West Milford Substation in order to avoid future inconveniences.
“Rather than taking a separate outage down the road out for that, we’ll have another crew working inside the substation so we can kill several birds with one stone,” Meyers said.”
Some of the work there will include replacing regulators and transformer arrestors.
Again, while Meyers and the company said they know it will be an inconvenience, the result will be a system that avoids outages in the future.
“When you have too much demand on the system, and if the infrastructure’s not in place, you can have voltage levels drop. When voltage levels drop across the transmission system, then you can have some widespread power outages. This is the kind of thing that can help us stave off those kinds of conditions.”