There will be a power outage in some areas of the Deltaville community on Wednesday, June 15, with a rain date of Thursday, June 16, reported Dominion Energy officials this week.
by Larry Chowning –
Starting at 7 a.m., some areas could be without electricity for as long as seven hours during transformer work.
Location of the outages
All customers to the east of Fishing Bay Family Practice (the Riverside Health Care facility at 16681 General Puller Highway) will lose their lights at approximately 7 a.m.
All customers east of Timberneck Road will be back on in approximately two hours. The customers in the area from Fishing Bay Road to Timberneck Road will be restored incrementally with all customers being restored no later than 2 p.m.
Dominion officials stated that the company is aware that it is inconvenient to not have power and it appreciates the community’s patience.
Dominion had been expected to send out a call notifying customers on June 6 or 7, and then another reminder call (or two) next week just prior to the outage.
Pinetop District Supervisor Lud Kimbrough said this week that “many citizens have contacted me asking what the ‘pole farm’ east of the coffee shop (Cafe by the Bay) was all about, so I hope the below explanation is informative.”
Reason for outage
Dominion would like to increase the reliability of the service in Deltaville. As it stands today, if the 12.5-kilovolt (kV) transformer at Deltaville substation were to fail, all of the customers that are provided electricity east of Providence Road, except along Fishing Bay Road, would lose lights until either repairs are made or a mobile substation is brought in to temporarily replace the transformer in the substation.
In either of these situations, the customer outage could be many, many hours (maybe even a day or longer), Dominion reps said. To mitigate this exposure, Dominion is investing approximately $2 million to upgrade the circuits.
From the substation to just before Timberneck Road, the primary voltage of most of the customers will be converted from the existing 12.5-kV voltage to 34.5-kV voltage.
There will be a short duration outage during the conversion. Other than the outage, this will be transparent to the customers as the service voltage will not change. Just before Timberneck Road, Dominion is installing a pair of five-mega volt ampere (MVA) transformers. These transformers will provide a redundant feed to those customers east of the installation location.
The normal operating parameters will be that one transformer will pick up all of the customers down Timberneck Road and the other will pick up the customers continuing down General Puller Highway (Route 33).
However, the transformers have been sized such that if one were to fail, within several hours Dominion would be able to switch the customers that are without lights to the operating transformer, minimizing the outage time until repairs can be made.
