New & Improved Equipment
The PUD owns and operated 9 substations, 24 miles of transmission line, 100’s of miles of above and below ground primary lines, and countless infrastructure from power poles, transmitters, transformers, and more. From the tip of the Coyle Peninsula to the edge of Sequim Bay to downtown Port Townsend we continue to maintain and upgraded utility services. Material sourcing for infrastructure–current and future growth–in modern times can be a challenge, and our dedicated staff works hard to ensure our line trucks are ready, tools and equipment are ordered and stocked and in good working order and our employees safe.
Enhanced Software
In the past two years Jefferson County PUD has also invested in new software programs like SCADA and OMS. SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software gathers data in real time from remote locations to control equipment and conditions. SCADA is used in the power industry as well as in telecommunications, transportation, and water and waste control. In an outage, Jefferson County PUD can use SCADA to reroute service instantly and remotely from one substation to another, which in some cases helps restore power even before the lineman arrive.
OMS is our Outage Management System. It helps us locate, track, and diagnose outages across the county online and in real time. If you have called in an outage in the last year and a half, our operators recorded your information into OMS. If you’ve set up a SmartHub account to pay your bill online, you can also use that same account to report an outage to OMS. And OMS lets you see outages in real time on our website’s Outage Map. Both SCADA and OMS, and even Smart Hub, have helped the Jefferson County PUD provide better service, faster.
Upgraded Facilities
Prior to 2013, Jefferson PUD had one office in Chimacum and 8 employees. Today we have more than 50 employees, two offices in Chimacum, and a main operations yard and customer service center at 310 Four Corners Road in Port Townsend and our newest facility at 191 Otto Street in Port Townsend. And we’re still growing.
In the next five years the PUD is looking to consolidate and modernize its operations and facilities into one or possibly two locations that will enhance staff capacity and improve customer service ability. 2019 Consolidated Facilities Project