After tornadoes, storms and floods, NES is prepping Nashville for emergencies | Opinion
By Brent Baker / Nashville Tennessean
In recent years, Middle Tennessee has experienced several natural disasters. During each of those events — ranging from tornadoes, to winter storms and floods — NES employees responded and worked around the clock until power had been restored to every customer experiencing an outage.
September is National Preparedness Month, an observance that encourages people to take steps to prepare for potential emergencies and disasters. And as Chief Operations and Innovation Officer, I want you to know that NES is dedicated to being prepared and keeping Nashville powered year-round.
We implement strategies to address any aging infrastructure, such as old poles that need to be replaced to better withstand bad weather. We contribute $25 million per year to pole inspection, maintenance and replacement, and we spend $1 million a year on reliability.
Substations, digital twin help NES better serve customers
We also recently built substations, including the 11th Avenue substation, which contains four transformers that distribute power to more than one-third of the downtown core business district and surrounding communities. Our new Central substation, a project we pursued to prioritize capacity, asset management and reliability for customers, launched in August 2025. The project serves roughly a third of the downtown business district and facilitates the long-term growth of the area.
We also updated existing substations, including the North and Hendersonville substations that were damaged during the December 2023 tornado.
NES has partnered with local and national experts to develop a new digital twin of our network to explore ways to improve service to all customers, including the energy burdened, by facilitating collaboration between other utilities, government agencies and other stakeholder groups. This will enable the exploration of new technologies and the positive impacts they can have on customers prior to implementation, reducing costs and risks. The digital twin will also allow us to determine the benefits of resiliency projects so NES can strategically deploy them in neighborhoods.
Earlier this year, we partnered with Tennessee State University and other organizations to conduct a virtual simulation of the devastating March 2020 tornado that hit Nashville. The demonstration illustrated how integrating community engagement with cutting-edge utility planning and technologies like microgrids can significantly enhance resilience strategies.
Music City Solar drives NES’s clean energy efforts
In addition to investing in new infrastructure, NES is increasing its commitment and spending on integrated vegetation management, to further improve reliability.
Regular vegetation management and proper pruning of trees reduce the number of power outages customers experience. To help prevent tree-related outages, NES employes certified arborists to maintain a year-round trimming program that ensures trees of all sizes are a safe distance from power lines and other equipment. Without regular tree trimming, vegetation is more likely to contact with power lines, causing outages.
NES also has projects that promote clean energy, including a 160 Megawatt solar farm, scheduled to come online in late 2027, and Music City Solar, Nashville’s first community solar array. Music City Solar was once was a landfill off I-65, but it now offers more than 17,000 panels of clean and efficient energy to the community. These projects offer cost savings to customers and cleaner energy to Middle Tennessee.
Through these annual contributions, NES can help Nashville stay prepared for disasters, emergencies and inclement weather. But there are steps our customers can also take to be prepared. Those include: maintaining their homes for cooler weather in the fall and winter, practicing energy saving habits and preparing for inclement weather.
When we work together to prepare for the challenging events that colder months and severe weather may cause, we make Nashville and Middle Tennessee a safer and more comfortable place to call home.
Brent Baker is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operations and Innovation Officer for NES. NES is the 11th largest public power utility in the nation, serving more than 460,000 customers across Middle Tennessee.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: After tornadoes, storms and floods, NES is prepping Nashville for emergencies | Opinion
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