The Oak Ridge City Council on Monday postponed a vote on a rezoning that could allow a large apartment complex along South Illinois Avenue.
City Council members said a 96-page traffic study for the project appeared to be from July, but they had only received it recently.
A rezoning that could be considered by the Oak Ridge Municipal Planning Commission could allow a dozen single-family residential lots on roughly five acres of currently vacant land on Warehouse Road.
The rezoning request, which does not obligate the property owner to build the homes, was presented to the Planning Commission during a non-voting session Thursday evening.
A new Weigel’s store has been proposed along South Illinois Avenue.
The 6,600-square-foot store would be on about 3.61 acres at the intersection with Union Valley Road.
The Oak Ridge City Council on Monday will consider a rezoning request that could allow about 400 apartments on roughly 32 acres along South Illinois Avenue.
The property is bordered by South Illinois Avenue, Mitchell Road, and Centrifuge Way (at the top of the hill headed out of Oak Ridge to Knoxville on South Illinois).
Building a new substation and electrical lines to supply power to a nuclear fuel company could cost $13 million, Oak Ridge officials said in December.
The nuclear fuel company, TRISO-X, needs about 32 to 35 megawatts of electricity at Horizon Center in west Oak Ridge. That would make the company the city’s biggest electrical customer. (Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex get most of their power directly from Tennessee Valley Authority.)
The Tennessee Valley Authority on Wednesday said it takes “full responsibility” for the impact of the first-ever mandatory power outages during the cold weather on Friday and Saturday last week, and it is reviewing what happened.
“We at TVA take full responsibility for the impact we had on our customers,” the electrical provider said in a press release posted on its website. “We never want to impact anyone’s energy at any time. This is not the way we want to serve our communities and customers.
“We are conducting a thorough review of what occurred and why. We are committed to sharing these lessons learned and—more importantly—the corrective actions we take in the weeks ahead to ensure we are prepared to manage significant events in the future.”
[Read more…]Government offices and other organizations have announced they will be closed or opening late Tuesday due to the weather.
The Anderson County Family Justice Center is closed, and Anderson County government offices are closed.
The Seventh Judicial District Attorney General’s Office is closed.
City of Oak Ridge offices are opening three hours late, at 11 a.m.
[Read more…]
The Tennessee Valley Authority said it delivered a record amount of power on Friday and set a winter record for peak power demand.
TVA supplied 740 gigawatt-hours, or 740 million kilowatt-hours, during a 24-hour period on Friday, December 23. That’s more energy supplied than at any other time in its 89-year history, TVA said.
The cold also produced a winter record for peak power demand of 33,425 megawatts at 7 p.m. Central time, when the region-wide average temperature was 9 degrees, TVA said.
“Record-setting temperatures across the region continue to put intense pressure on the power system,” TVA said in a press release. “The Tennessee Valley Authority and local power companies (worked) around the clock in difficult conditions to meet this extreme demand.”
[Read more…]Note: This story was last updated at 12 p.m.
Mandatory rolling power blackouts continued in Oak Ridge and across the region Saturday morning. The City of Oak Ridge announced at about 11:40 a.m. Saturday that the power outages had been terminated.
Here is the previous story:
The blackouts will affect 10 percent of customers at a time, and power outages will last about 30 minutes, the City of Oak Ridge said in a press release. That’s a larger percentage of customers who will be affected by the Saturday outages than the ones on Friday, when about 2 percent of Oak Ridge customers were affected.
The Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides power to the City of Oak Ridge, said the blackouts are necessary because of the extreme weather conditions, according to the press release. The power demand is high as temperatures have dropped into the single digits in what has been called a “once-in-a-generation” storm.
TVA said the power demand is among its highest in its nearly 90-year history. Typical power demands for December are around 24,000 megawatts. On Friday, power demands surpassed 33,000 megawatts, TVA said.
[Read more…]Note: This story was updated at 3 p.m.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has terminated rolling blackouts in Oak Ridge.
“Everything is now going back to normal,” City of Oak Ridge spokesperson Lauren Gray said.
The mandatory rolling blackouts that affected electricity across the region and in the City of Oak Ridge were to help TVA meet the power demand today (Friday, December 23), a press release said.
The blackouts were expected to affect about 2 percent of Oak Ridge Electric Department customers and last for about 30 minutes, the press release said. The blackouts were expected across the Tennessee Valley.
They were being conducted because of the low temperatures and to meet high power demand, according to the press release, which came from the City of Oak Ridge.
Information was not available about which 2 percent of customers were affected, although there were measures in place to ensure hospitals, fire departments, and other similar operations are not without power, Gray said.
[Read more…]
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency has tested birds after black vultures were reported dead between Edgemoor Road and Haw Ridge, but the state agency does not have test results yet.
On Thursday, Oak Ridge Today counted at least a dozen dead birds in the brush and submerged near the shoreline along the concrete portion of the trail across from the Bull Run Fossil Plant. There were also at least four dozen live vultures perched nearby in trees close to the high-voltage power lines from Bull Run.
