BrightRidge Broadband has proven to be incredibly successful for Tennessee public power utility BrightRidge since it launched in 2019 and Jeff Dykes, CEO of BrightRidge, sees the business as a legacy project.
“Our community embraced high-speed fiber and actually have us coming in to hook them up as soon as they could get access” to 10 gig speeds, Dykes noted in a recent interview with APPA for the Public Power Now podcast.
When that started growing, the utility saw it as offering a competitive advantage “for us because we're the first in the nation to launch with 10 gig service right away.”
BrightRidge Broadband fiber has already passed 73% of customers receiving service “with our long-term goal of reaching a hundred percent, no matter how far or how hard it is to get to them,” Dykes said.
“We will keep growing until we've reached them all, and we, like many, have seen a large amount of people moving to our area,” he said.
Dykes said it is exciting to see communities like Johnson City and Jonesborough, which are served by the utility, have been listed “as having the fastest Internet speeds in the nation and listed in magazines as a great place to move to” in part due to affordable, high-speed fiber broadband.
He noted that BrightRidge's role is not just to provide electric and broadband services.
“What can we do to better our community? And this was just another one that allowed us to do that, whether it was working from home or benefitting our schools and students.”
Broadband also gives key tools for doctors to thrive in their jobs. Broadband allows doctors to “transfer large amounts of data that if something occurs in the hospital, from their home, they can have this data remotely sent to them, and then uplink it back because of the large 10 gig (symmetrical) possibilities of serving them,” he noted.
“It's really had a huge impact for our community, just like our electric did back in the early days, when electric had a huge impact and just changed regions for the good -- broadband is doing the same.”
Dykes sees broadband as a legacy project for the utility. The board that approved the broadband effort “will be able to look back…20, 30 years from now, and say, you know, we had the opportunity to have an impact on our community that is there, still growing, and has really transformed the region,” he said.
On July 8, the utility said that more than 2,000 rural residents and businesses now have access to BrightRidge Broadband following completion this month of a Middle Mile grant project in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development Broadband Office. The $9.54 million construction project reaches 2,067 BrightRidge Electric customers in Fall Branch, South Central, Lamar, Bowmantown, Buckingham Road and Mill Springs in Washington and Greene counties.
In the interview, Dykes also discussed recent news involving energy storage.
In May, Seven States Power Corporation announced it will deliver a significant infrastructure investment to modernize the electric grid in partnership with BrightRidge.
The initiative will deploy 20 megawatts of battery storage as a standalone resource, designed to offset peak demand, improve grid resiliency, and provide BrightRidge with greater operational flexibility.
“For BrightRidge, Seven States projects are going to give us a really important tool, we believe, to help us to do additional things, managing our peak, supporting resiliency on our system and give us some flexibility in our operations day to day,” he said.
He also discusses solar energy and BrightRidge’s high levels of reliability.
