Poultry plant’s productivity push aided by repair work

With so many Mississippians spending more time at home during the COVID-19 crisis, most families are seeing their need for groceries increasing.

One item that’s frequently on the menu is chicken.

Mississippi Power provides service to a number of poultry plants in the Pine Belt area, and most are reporting an increase in production during the pandemic.

Last weekend, Pine Belt crews worked a planned outage at the Mar-Jac Poultry facility in Hattiesburg. It was one of several projects completed at the plant in the last six months.

“Through our relationship with the customer, we’ve been working to help make their facility more reliable,” Industrial Marketing Specialist Ron Robertson said. “They’d been having issues on their distribution system and this project was another way to provide service and value to Mar-Jac.”

Discussions between Mar-Jac and Mississippi Power’s Major Accounts and Business and Industry Services teams about potential solutions actually began late in 2019. Several projects were being discussed; with the first being an improvement to the facility’s power factor.

Additionally, the company performed breaker maintenance and transformer oil testing over a 48-hour weekend period in January. The results of the oil testing showed there was a potential overheating of their transformers and numerous other issues.

“Our credibility improved each time we solved a problem,” Project Manager Steve Armour said. “The power factor improvement project was completed seamlessly last weekend with several capacitor banks and other equipment installed.”

Other work has been scheduled to continue assisting the plant’s operations.

“We proactively installed a pole for a future project that will allow us to perform more pre-work and reduce future outage time when that project is executed,” Engineering Supervisor Matt Ball said. “Credit goes to Distribution Engineer Deidra Robinson for identifying that solution and Line Construction and Maintenance Supervisor Joe Dye and his team for safely performing this work.”

“By synergizing our efforts across multiple groups, we’ve delivered repeated results for this customer,” Armour said.

Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company (NYSE: SO), produces safe, reliable and environmentally responsible energy for more than 188,000 customers in 23 southeast Mississippi counties. With nearly 160 megawatts of approved solar energy capacity, Mississippi Power is the largest partner in providing renewable energy in the state of Mississippi. Visit our website at mississippipower.com, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

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