The tie that is made on the source side of the meter is the point of connection between CAEC and the member. If your service wire is underground, CAEC connects the service wire to your underground meter box. If your service is overhead, CAEC connects the service wire to your weatherhead, which is the point of connection between CAEC’s facilities and the homeowner’s.
In the last five years the cost of transformers has risen 50 percent, partly due to escalating material costs and also to federal regulations requiring higher efficiencies.įrom the distribution transformer, a service wire is connected to your house, which is called the service drop.
From there, power is distributed across miles (depending on how far your home is from the substation) of power lines to reach a distribution transformer, which steps the power down again to the voltage level required by your home, which is 120/240 Volts. We’re not ready to get the power to your house just yet the voltage coming from the power transformer, at 25,000 or 13,200 volts, is still too high to go directly into your home. Power transformers are used to step the voltage down to an acceptable level to bring into your neighborhoods. The voltage coming to the substation, at 115,000 or 46,000 volts, is too high to go directly into your neighborhoods. Siting and building a substation is no simple process in fact, from the planning phase to implementation, it takes two to three years to complete just one, at a cost of approximately $1.5 million.
When you sign up for service, no matter what your intentions are for that meter, we have to factor in your current and future needs for power into these forecasts. CAEC uses long-term forecasting to plan for new substations, which has a direct impact on reliability. A lot of work goes into planning new substations or even substation upgrades. Distribution substations step down the voltage coming in from the transmission lines in order to begin the process of sending power to your home. Our substations are the point at which power grid infrastructure becomes distribution. CAEC purchases energy from our generation and transmission co-op, PowerSouth, which generates or purchases the electricity and transmits it over long distances on transmission lines to distribution utilities, like CAEC.