If our plants are the heart of power production at TVA, then the System Operations Center (SOC) is the mind. The SOC acts as the grid’s nervous system, reacting and responding to events in real-time.
The headquarters, encapsulated within 10-inch-thick concrete walls, contains a semi-circular control room lined with dozens and dozens of screens. From meteorology feeds to a live look at every substation across the seven-state service area, the SOC has its eyes on the pulse of the Valley region. The operators use a system called SCADA, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, to monitor and control breakers and switches in the field.
In early 2026, these vital controls will change hands — from its current home in Chattanooga to a new, state-of-the-art facility in Georgetown, Tennessee. To a civilian, this might seem as simple as handing over the keys. To the experts at the wheel, it’s a monumental task.
“Every substation has to be verified against the new Emergency Management System (EMS),” Brian Ramels, Program Manager for Transmission Maintenance, explained. “There are hundreds of thousands of data points. It’s very tedious.”
Telecom Field Engineer Josh Key is one of the boots-on-the-ground employees checking the switches.
“It is monotonous, but we’ve gotten to where we can perform checks relatively quickly,” Josh said. “Small sites might have 10-20 points, some may have up to 1,500. We’ve got people monitoring the controller side and verifying the state changes, so we know every point is mapped properly.”
So far, 70% of the roughly 200,000 points have completed their checks.
Dusty Wright, Manager of SCADA and Reliability Systems, leads the team on the other side of those checkouts verifying data points. “These folks in the field traveling to all the nearly 600 substations across the valley are working around the clock,” he said. “The commitment and the effort from these teams is incredibly inspiring.”
A major objective of the SOC is to prevent a lapse in service. Avoiding disruption during the transition adds another layer of complexity to this already complicated mission.
“There will be testing all the way to the go-live date,” Dusty said. “There will be a period after all the points are checked that we will set aside 1,000 hours of run time to make sure everything runs smoothly.”
When things run smoothly at the SOC, service for the Valley region runs smoothly, too.
And service is just what Dusty Wright was looking for when he found TVA.
“I kind of struggled when I got out of the Army wondering how I was going to find a job where I felt as if I were still serving the community,” he said. “Being able to work for TVA filled that hole for me. We truly are serving people with this project.”
Although it might be easy to get lost in the checklist and seemingly endless data, this team never loses sight of their why.
To Stan Allen, Maintenance Specialist in Telecom, these data points are connected to something much more visceral.
“As a child I looked up at the flume line at Ocoee and dreamed of being up there,” Stan said. “And now I can. I can drive my truck up there and stand on top of it. I have the keys. So, to me, I got my dream job.”