Planning Ahead

April 2025

Every three years, Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative makes a construction work plan that guides all long-term building projects. The goal is to create a roadmap that will ensure the cooperative has the resources to quickly add a new service when consumer-members need it, maintain the high quality of service they are used to, and improve reliability wherever possible.

“Planning in the present averts emergencies in the future,” says SVEC Director of Engineering Kurt Miller. “If you don’t have a plan and you’re reacting to everything as it comes, that’s not a good situation. Particularly for large projects.”

The cooperative’s engineers model the system to get a picture of how much capacity, voltage, and range it will need in the coming years. With those considerations in mind, they can start prioritizing improvements and maintenance that will keep the system performing at the high levels our consumer members expect.

“This kind of planning is really a good thing because otherwise we would be reacting a lot,” Miller says. “We’d rather plan for something that could happen in the future than find out it’s happening now and it’s going to take eight months to fix it. We don’t want to be in that position.”

Despite a challenging 2024 storm season that slowed down construction plans, SVEC is now in year two of the current work plan and making great strides toward the goals it set one year ago. Learn more about those goals and the price of building a reliable electric system.

2024-26 Plan Goals

  • Install 2,154 service connections: Deliver electricity to new homes, businesses and other buildings.
  • Maintain power quality and reliability: Implement system improvements, like substation capacity upgrades, to ensure a steady and dependable electric supply with fewer outages or voltage issues.
  • Reduce energy waste: Make the system more efficient with volt-ampere reactive resources and remote alarms to alert to inefficiencies so that less electricity
  • Expand automation with eight new circuits and other monitoring: Add smart technology to parts of the electrical system to detect and fix issues faster.
  • Improve main power lines with smart fault indicators: Install these devices to help quickly find and fix power outages.
  • Upgrade infrastructure: Replace 64 miles of old power lines and upgrade older copper wires to better, more efficient materials.
  • Replace 2,196 utility poles: Swap out aging poles with new ones to improve safety and reliability.

Total Work Plan Cost

SVEC only invests time and money in a project if it will have a clear benefit for consumer members. Below is a breakdown of what each part of the three-year work plan costs.

  • New construction: for new services, transformers and meters.
  • System improvements: for upgrades like automated metering and outage reporting, substation capacity improvements and reliability projects.
  • System maintenance: for poles, conductors and grounding upgrades.