Glenn Fisher, Director for Oklahoma public power utility Edmond Electric, recently provided details related to grid projects being pursued by the utility that will bolster reliability.
He made his remarks at a recent Edmond City Council workshop.
“Our goals for the next year – we want to continue our feeder and substation improvement projects,” he said at an April 14 City Council budget meeting.
“We’ve been doing quite a few of those over the last five to ten years,” he noted. “We want to continue to strengthen our feeders for reliability purposes and additional capacity.”
Edmond Electric has been recognized by APPA through its Reliable Public Power Provider program at the highest level – the Diamond level. The program recognizes utilities that demonstrate high proficiency in reliability, safety, workforce development, and system improvement.
“We’re going to start some of our bond funded projects – most notably our Garber and Mitch substations,” he said.
Fisher noted that the Mitch substation was “very fully loaded last year – we’re doing some improvements there that should be in place before summer this year.”
To help alleviate “some of the load off of that Mitch substation, we’re going to add” a new substation, he added.
Meanwhile, Fisher noted that the utility has “made a lot of investments in our smart metering system and our SCADA system…made a lot of investments in that in the last few years and one of the things we want to do – there’s a lot of data associated with that that we can help improve our distribution system with.”
So the utility is looking at “over the next ten year window to start adding positions – engineering positions and technician positions – and start taking advantage of that data.”
On the topic of rates, Fisher said that “I do not anticipate any change to our base rates in the next five years.”
