J UNE
Central Florida is one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. Nearly a quarter million people moved to Florida over the last 12 months. Historical data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that the three largest counties SECO Energy serves (Lake, Marion and Sumter) posted impressive population gains over the last decade. SECO now serves over 222,000 homes and businesses in our seven-county service territory. In 2021 alone, SECO added 5,770 accounts, and in March 2022, we broke a 15-year record for the highest number of new accounts established in a month. The growth positions SECO as the third-largest distribution electric cooperative in the state and the seventh largest in the country out of 800 not-for-profit cooperatives. While this edition of Wynn’s Wire focuses on Lake County expansion and improvement projects reliability in every part of our service territory is a priority. Watch for upcoming Wynn’s Wire columns for updates on projects in the other counties we serve. Better yet, visit SECOEnergy.com today to view our System Reliability and Expansion Map to see what projects are occurring in your area right now. In 2021, SECO welcomed 2,038 new services in Lake County. This accounts for 35% of our overall 2021 new meter count. With the population increase and growing demand for safe, affordable, reliable energy, I’m excited to share SECO’s system improvement projects that benefit the SECO members in Lake County. These electric infrastructure improvements and expansions
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will increase members’ service reliability and add redundancy for quicker outage restoration. South Lake County is growing extraordinarily fast. The population in Clermont, Fruitland Park, Groveland and Minneola are increasing at some of the highest rates in the state. SECO has nearly completed a new power substation named Sawgrass to handle the growing load in the southern portion of Lake County. The substation is state-of-the-art and will be a part of an overall design to provide redundant power sources to the members throughout the region to further avoid lengthy outages. The design of the Sawgrass substation utilizes two Duke Energy transmission lines in a looped configuration serving both sides of SECO’s distribution lines in the substation. This redundancy increases reliability for the members served from the Clermont and the Sawgrass substations. This two-way loop increases the ability of crews to restore service to members served by both substations through distribution backfeeding. Members served by our Clermont substation may remember the lengthy transmission outage in October 2019 that lasted for over eight hours. While this very impactful, non-storm-related outage was caused by a neighboring utility’s transmission line issue, we are extending our efforts to avoid a future recurrence of outages that are caused by others. We are totally committed to take steps to reduce outage time and increase reliability, regardless of the cause.
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