Tri-County
Electric Co-op
Serious mapping
December 1998
Along the
Kentucky-Tennessee border, a consumer-owned electric utility is
aiming lasers, contacting satellites orbiting the earth, and feeding
the information from those measurements into their computers.
Tri-County
Electric Membership Corporation is making a map. A big, detailed,
state-of-the-art map pinpointing every house, every power pole, and
every transformer, insulator, crossarm, and guy wire on those poles.
"This ought
to lead to quicker reconnections when the power goes out, because
we'll know exactly where we're going and what to bring along to make
the repairs," says David Callis, Tri-County executive vice
president and general manager. "We'll also be able to give
people more precise information when they call asking when their
power will be back on."
The Tri-County
co-op, headquartered in Lafayette, Tennessee, distributes
electricity to 43,000 homes and businesses in seven Kentucky
counties and seven more counties in Tennessee. The mapping project
began a year and a half ago and will continue for the next year and
a half. One of the first orders of business was to send news
releases to newspapers describing what the co-op would be doing. One
of the reasons for contacting the media was to avoid a lot of phone
calls from people puzzling over why crews were driving around
neighborhoods pointing yellow laser range-finder guns at houses and
power poles.
The project is
called the Facilities Mapping System, and involves using satellite
coordinates that can locate any spot in the world. The map will be
computerized and will be able to tell line workers and others within
3 feet of where a pole is located. The electronic maps can also be
updated more quickly and efficiently than paper maps, and they'll be
able to be carried in laptop computers in the co-op's trucks.
Although getting
the lights back on faster is one of the easiest to understand uses
of the mapping system, it offers a lot of other advantages,
including better business planning.
"My yearly
work plans will be more accurate," says Jim Beecham, Tri-County
director of engineering. "I'll know exactly how old each pole
is and will be able to make better projections of when equipment
will need to be replaced."
The project is
also helping others in the Tri-County service territory. The co-op
has offered the mapping for certain uses by city and county
governments. The first group to take advantage of the offer is
Tennessee's Macon County 911 emergency phone call service.
Tri-County has been able to give that 911 service an extremely
accurate mapping system, and saved them as much as $30,000 in the
process.
"We have to
do this kind of mapping in order to provide competitive electric
service to our consumer-members," says Callis. "And as
long as we're doing it, it's our obligation to help the community by
sharing this information." |
