Director, David Brown
The Patriot parkway switching station was commissioned in November 2021, bringing a significant reliability improvement to the entire northern part of Nolin RECCs Service territory.
Prior to the construction of the station by East Kentucky Power Cooperative, our Generation and Transmission provider, a public accident occurred in the Vine Grove area that involved a plane crashing into a high voltage transmission line. As a result of the damage to the transmission line, seven of Nolin’s electrical distribution substations lost service and over 13,000 Nolin members were without power. Should the same exact outage scenario occur after the construction of the new station, only three electrical distribution substations would be affected and the number of Nolin members experiencing a power outage would be greatly reduced. As for other outages scenarios that could occur, the impact would be reduced to one substation whereas it might have impacted multiple substations in the past.
To understand the function of the new switching station, think of the breakers in your electrical panel that serve various lighting, receptacle, or appliance circuits throughout your home. If you had fewer breakers and the same circuits were still present, more loads would experience an outage in the event of a short circuit or tripped breaker. While the transmission system that delivers power from generation sources to our substations is much more complex than your home’s electrical panel, some of the equipment operates similarly. In the case of the Patriot Parkway switching station, new transmission breakers were added to reduce the impact of outages when they occur. In the event of a short circuit or fault on a section of transmission line, one the breakers can isolate the problematic area to avoid more widespread impacts to other areas.
The Patriot Parkway switching station is a significant reliability investment for members served by Radcliff, T Brown Logsdon, Vine Grove, South Boundary, Rineyville, and Smithersville 1 & 2 substations. While the station itself is located in board district four and is very near the boundary of board district one, it is an improvement that benefits thousands of members across multiple board districts.
