Cherryland Electric Cooperative (Cherryland) and their power supplier, Wolverine Power Supply Cooperative (Wolverine), broke ground on two operations projects totaling 20,720 square feet in Grand Traverse County this week.

Cherryland started a 7,920 square foot expansion to their shop behind their Grawn office. “This is our first major construction project since the 1980s,” says Frank Siepker, engineering and operations manager at Cherryland. “The increase in shop capacity gives us the ability to store more trucks and equipment in an ‘at-ready’ state, effectively decreasing lineworkers’ response time to an outage.” The expansion includes a mechanic’s bay that keeps vehicle maintenance in-house and limits the cost of third party repairs. An additional full-time mechanic will be brought on to accommodate the increase in on-site vehicle maintenance.

Wolverine also began construction on a new service center across from their current service center in Grawn. The service center features increased storage capacity for material and equipment and includes office space, meeting areas, and a lab area. Wolverine looks to the 12,800 square foot facility to advance response capabilities to potential substation or transmission situations occurring in their service territory.

Both projects are scheduled for completion in fall 2016.