With the beginning of summer on the horizon, Franklin REC is progressing through its seasonal projects. Line Superintendent Scott Hagenson.
“We’ll be doing a lot of rebuilding of some of the original line that was put in in the system,” Hagenson says. “We’ll probably get hopefully five to eight miles of line built between now and end of the calendar year or more. Several upgrades throughout the system, people changing from overhead to underground, redoing some things. There is, especially in the north half of our system, seems to be a little bit more new acreages coming into play, homes, that type of thing. All of those people prefer underground.”
Hagenson says underground line installation is becoming a popular option, and the reliability outweighs any potential drawbacks.
“You survive storms better the more underground you have. The downfall is when you do have a problem, if you do have underground that goes bad, you can’t just look up and see it. So it’s a little trickier to diagnose and maybe repair, but in the last 20 years, advances in materials for underground electricity have really come a long ways. So it’s really reliable.”
Hagenson was featured on Thursday’s FCDA Economic Spotlight on 104.9 KLMJ.