GREENVILLE, N.C (WNCT) — Supply chain issues continue to cause problems across the state. Greenville Utilities Commission officials said they are feeling the effects.
In a recent board meeting, GUC reported bids coming in at a much higher rate than expected on two major projects because of a lack of available materials. They say they will still complete these projects on time but not without have to make budget cuts elsewhere.
Director of Electrical Systems with GUC, John Worrell, said they are seeing problems in the current market with copper, aluminum, transformers and things with resins like conduit and fiberglass. He said the first project will create a transmission line loop to improve power delivery during emergencies. The other is a resiliency project to replace old wooden poles with steel transmission poles.
He said bids for the transmission line project came in 65% higher than expected, and 45% higher for the steel poles.
“So of course, that is way over what we had anticipated on cost-wise, so we’ll have to make some budget amendments to be able to cover those costs,” said Worrell.
And he added, that bother projects are very important, saying, “If we have another storm event or something of that magnitude, it could cause more outages on our system.”
He said they won’t let necessary projects go uncompleted.
“It’s not something that we take lightly, and that we are going to do what we need to do to keep our reliability of our system in place,” he said.
And on top of increased prices, wait times for transformers are currently two years long.
“So we’re doing things to try to mitigate that by either working with other utilities to try to group our purchasing to get better factory slots in the manufacturing process. We’re looking at expanding our other vendors,” said Worrell.
And he said if things continue to get worse, “there’s no good answer for right now. It’s just like everyone has to you know, tighten the belt every once in a while to get through these tight times, and that’s what we’re gonna do too.”
Worrell said another added problem is lack of staffing, adding they are trying to fix this problem by adding competitive compensation and benefits packages.
