Insights > Reliability Issues in Clay County

Reliability Issues in Clay County
By:

04/09/2018

Dear Entergy Arkansas Customers in Clay County,

At Entergy Arkansas, our intent is to provide our customers with affordable, reliable power 24/7/365. Unfortunately, now and then the best of intentions get thwarted by severe weather, equipment failure, or other difficulties. Our customers in Corning have had more than their share of power interruptions lately, and we wanted to both apologize and explain.

Since 2016, our team has been working to rebuild a portion of the cross-country, high-voltage transmission line that serves Northeast Arkansas. This major project is aimed at enhancing service reliability and meeting the needs of a growing economy. The upgrade is scheduled to be completed by June 2019.

When we take a transmission line out of service to upgrade it, we are left with fewer options for backups. This is particularly true in Clay County. Taking one transmission line out of service leaves the network vulnerable to outages should the remaining operational transmission line experience a problem.

We have determined the outage on March 24 and two outages on March 29 were caused by an equipment failure on the remaining operational line. The issue was at the Jim Hill substation in Southeast Missouri, just east of St. Francis. Transmission engineers and field technicians isolated the problem and corrected the issue March 30. While the shortage of transmission back-up issue remains, for now, we have repaired the equipment that caused the outages March 24 and 29.

We are taking extra steps to monitor components on the operational line to prevent another major outage while back-up transmission options are limited. We are conducting periodic preventive helicopter patrols of the transmission lines. Crews have also carefully inspected substations for any reliability issues within those components.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience associated with the outages, and we will do all we can to keep the lights on as we complete these significant upgrades to the equipment serving Clay County. We’re building for the future, and we appreciate our customers’ support as we work to prepare the electrical infrastructure for the good things to come to Clay County in the years ahead.

Sincerely,

Melanie Taylor
Vice President of Customer Service

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Arkansas 
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