MTEMC Plans Outages to Complete Three-Month Distribution Upgrade Project

Middle Tennessee Electric Membership Corp. (MTEMC) is working to improve residential and commercial electric service in Lebanon, TN by requiring outages along South Cumberland Street in Lebanon as part of a city-wide distribution upgrade project. The scheduled work is the final leg of a three-month project to double the voltage of MTEMC lines along South Cumberland St. from 7.2 kV to 14.4 kV. The outages will require approximately 30 residential customers and 18 commercial businesses to be without power. The scheduled times for the outages are from 12 a.m. until 4 a.m.

“This will conclude the work we began several months ago along South Cumberland and will improve our service to that area of Lebanon,” MTEMC Field Engineer Chris Weaver said. “Doubling our systems line voltage improves the amount of electricity the lines can carry and decreases electric current losses, making our system more efficient and reliable.” Over the three-month period, the work was broken up into small segments in order to inconvenience as few customers as a time. The work primarily entailed changing out transformers to the higher voltage. MTEMC used its own crews to do the work.