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Alabama Power Lines Knockout Power to 1,700 CVEC Consumers
TALLADEGA, Ala. - At approximately 7:05 Thursday morning, Alabama Power transmission
lines feeding Coosa Valley Electric Cooperative's Stockdale Substation lost
power, leaving approximately 1,766 CVEC members without electricity.
The Stockdale Substation is located in the Stockdale community and serves consumers
south into Clay County, West along Ironaton Road and North into Eastaboga.
"Initially, we had about 1,766 consumers out, but our crews were able to
restore power to nearly 80 percent of the consumers by about 8:50 a.m. by back
feeding or routing power from our Lincoln and Talladega substations," said
Frank Kujawski, CVEC general manager.
By 10:15 a.m. Alabama Power crews were able to reroute transmission power to
the substation, which allowed CVEC crews to restore electricity to all the affected
consumers. However, as of 10:30 a.m., Alabama Power officials had not determined
the cause of their outage.
CVEC currently has under construction a substation in Eastaboga that will pickup
a large portion of the loads from the Lincoln and Stockdale substations. Kujawski
said that the effects of future outages at Stockdale, Lincoln and Talladega
should be minimized even further once this new substation is completed in about
eight months.
CVEC is a distribution cooperative that buys its power from Alabama Electric
Cooperative (AEC), a generation and transmission cooperative headquartered in
Andalusia.
"Although CVEC does not buy its power from Alabama Power, we must use Alabama
Power transmission lines to deliver the power generated by AEC," Kujawski
said. "This practice is called 'wheeling' and is mandated by federal law."
Coosa Valley Electric, which serves more than 15,000 customers in Talladega,
St. Clair, Shelby, Clay, Etowah and Calhoun counties, is a Touchstone Energy7
cooperative. Nationwide, some 1,000 cooperatives provide power to rural America,
and 570 of those operate under the Touchstone Energy umbrella.
For more information, contact:
Jon Cullimore 362-4180 or 1-800-273-7210, ext. 225, Fax: 256-761-2615, Cell: 256-299-0551
Barbara Edmondson 1-800-273-7210, ext. 224
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