Entergy Building $23 Million Nerve Center In Little Rock
by November 14, 2014 11:32 pm 136 views
Entergy Corp. is building a new $23 million facility in Little Rock to help coordinate its services throughout a four-state service area. The transmission operations center will coordinate operations and has been described as the company’s “nerve center.”
The facility will have:
- Capacity to house approximately 70 employees.
- 25,000 square feet, with 15 operator consoles, 9 offices and 43 cubicles.
- Provisions to reduce risks of severe weather events and can withstand an F5 tornado.
“This new operations center is representative of a lengthy list of projects we have planned for the Arkansas transmission grid,” said Entergy Arkansas, Inc., President and CEO Hugh McDonald. “We will invest about $900 million over the next five years on transmission lines, substations and related equipment to ensure the system is up to the long-term demands the future will bring.”
“We’ll also have operators that will remotely open and close switches and breakers and also coordinate line outages in our system for construction and maintenance,” said Rick Riley, Entergy Vice President of transmission.
The center is part of a plan to consolidate six facilities to two, one in Little Rock and the other in Jackson, Mississippi. The center is scheduled to open in the summer of 2016.