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West Florida Electric Cooperative (WFEC), in partnership with PowerSouth Energy Cooperative, recently began upgrades and construction work inside its Alford substation and completed upgrade work inside its Graceville substation - essential steps in strengthening our electrical distribution system for current and future needs.

“In light of the recent winter storms and severe winter weather patterns, WFEC is working with PowerSouth Energy to upgrade the Alford substation to add capacity to support extreme weather events and system growth,” said WFEC’s System Engineer.

Power companies across the southeast experienced extreme demand situations due to the winter storm that hit portions of the country in January 2025. Many of these systems saw an all-time historical system peak, including WFEC. Historically, many southeastern utilities, including West Florida Electric, are winter peaking systems. Heat pumps and strip heating are leading contributors to this high demand. Heat pumps are the most efficient way to provide heating in warmer climates, like ours, where freezing temperatures are not as common.

“Multiple line crews from both cooperatives worked together to limit the outage length experienced by co-op members,” said Greg Calloway, Supervisor of Technical Services. “While the mobile substation carried the Alford load, the distribution substation transformer, regulators, and lightning arrestors were replaced along with other upgrades to the transmission grid inside the substation.”

According to Calloway, during the outage at Alford, obsolete switches will be replaced with new switches capable of carrying more load on each circuit. The plan is designed to upgrade the distribution substation transformer to a larger size capable of serving the growing area and high demands during winter peaking events. The upgrades at the Graceville substation in early April included a reconstruction of the Graceville transmission grid and updates from a wire grid to a more robust pipe grid.

“This improved grid ensures a more hardened system against the natural elements such as hurricanes and storms. The newer grid is necessary to provide a more reliable system for now and in the years to come for WFEC and PowerSouth,” said Calloway.

These efforts are part of WFEC’s ongoing commitment to system resilience. As population growth and energy use continue to rise, these proactive upgrades will help ensure the system can meet increasing demands while handling whatever nature throws its way. 

WFEC performs short-term and long-term system studies to determine system needs for reliability and improvements. These studies determine areas of need, which could include system upgrades, feeder upgrades, or the potential of new substations sited at the areas of high demand to help evenly distribute load.

West Florida Electric and PowerSouth Energy Cooperative work together annually to project system peaks for both the winter and summer seasons. West Florida is one of twenty cooperatives in the PowerSouth service area.  PowerSouth takes into account the projections of each of the twenty members to ensure that there is enough generation capacity available to serve everyone safely and reliably.

“West Florida is working diligently to improve our system not only for the present, but also for years to come,” said Calloway.