FLEC Applauds Our Safety-Minded Legislators

3/23/2021

State Representative Lowell Russell (Vonore) met with members of the Fort Loudoun Electric Cooperative’s management and operations team in the Cooperative’s board room at the beginning of March to discuss proposed legislation this year.  One particular piece of legislation discussed was SB 407-HB 252…known as the Lineman Safety Bill.  “This legislation calls to amend Tennessee Code Annotated, Section 68-101-104, relative to electrical safety,” Jarrod Brackett, FLEC’s CEO shared.  “This piece of legislation helps us to make sure everyone is working together to keep our communities safe,” Brackett explained.  “We encourage people to have backup power supplies and emergency plans…especially for extremely cold or hot times when power outages occur due to storms.  But, we want to help make sure that when someone is using a generation source… that it is properly connected so that our linemen and the general public cannot get exposed to life-threatening back feed onto the electric system.”  
Representative Russell, Representative Mark Cochran, Representative Bob Ramsey, Representative Jerome Moon, and Representative Kent Calfee all have supported this bill and all voted for this bill when it passed in the House of Representatives on March 11th.  The bill is pending a vote in the Senate. As introduced, the bill requires persons working with certain electrical equipment involved in interconnection with an electric power distribution grid to meet national and state safety requirements.  If passed, it will require that electrical generation equipment interconnected be inspected by a state-certified electrical inspector.   “With more interest in back-up generation power systems (i.e. solar energy, battery backup, and generator systems) at homes and businesses today, Fort Loudoun Electric Cooperative (FLEC) and other electric utilities applaud our State Legislators for stepping up and helping us to make sure that people safely interconnect,” Brackett concluded. 

 

(Pictured left to right: Mike Webb, Representative Lowell Russell, Chris Trentham, and Kevin Massingale)