Rocky Nimmons/Courier

Blue Ridge Electric president and CEO Charles Dalton, right, talks with Frank Looper during the co-op’s annual members meeting last week in Pickens.

COUNTY — Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative is taking steps to add capacity to its system to welcome new and future growth.

Blue Ridge president and CEO Charles Dalton delivered remarks at a recent media luncheon in Clemson.

“Last year, we welcomed 389 net new members onto Blue Ridge lines,” he said. “That was our best showing since 2008, although it still fell well short of the kind of annual growth we had been experiencing before the onset of the Great Recession.”

Cooperative officials have been encouraged by a number of projects either already underway or recently announced within Blue Ridge’s service area, Dalton said.

In Pickens County, Reliable Sprinkler announced official plans last week for an expansion that will include erecting a new structure at the Pickens County Commerce Park in Liberty. Oconee County has welcomed the start of a huge commercial development and mega-church complex directly across Lake Hartwell from Clemson. An industrial combination, Baxter Enterprises and Hi-Tech Mold and Engineering, will soon break ground at the Oconee Industry and Technology Park. Anderson County currently has two industrial buildings under construction.

Those coming commercial and industrial prospects might be just the beginning, Dalton said.

“Signals we’ve received from local economic development agencies indicate that there are good numbers of other industrial prospects who are also looking very seriously at this northwestern corner of South Carolina,” Dalton said. “Whatever might be headed our way, I can assure you that Blue Ridge plans to be ready for it.”

The cooperative plans to build new substations “when and where they’re needed,” Dalton said.

Blue Ridge Electric energized its new Golden Corner substation in southwestern Oconee County several months ago and will soon bring on line a substation in Landrum.

Plans are underway to enlarge its Piercetown substation in Anderson County, Dalton said.

“All these additions to our physical plant point to a higher level of service for members on the Blue Ridge system,” he said.

The cooperative’s line-construction crews are “quite busy right now,” Dalton said.

“We’re hopeful that indicates the volume of work will continue to increase,” he said.

Much of that construction work involves making further improvements to the cooperative’s 7,000-mile network of power lines, Dalton said.

“Lengthy spans of existing power lines are being upgraded in order to build more capacity into our distribution system in the name of service reliability,” he said.

In many cases, this involves moving poles and wires out of wooded areas and into new locations along edge-of-road rights of way.

“Positioning these lines away from away from forested land can certainly help to make service for members more dependable,” Dalton said.