As the need for electricity increases, so does the demand on the electric infrastructure in the area. That is why for the past few years NSTAR crews have been working in Arlington to enhance the area’s electric system to meet the challenges of this growth.
In 2003, NSTAR began a four phase infrastructure program in Arlington to address concerns regarding system reliability. The program focuses on several key projects including upgrading existing equipment, reconfiguring existing circuitry and creating new circuits to deliver electricity to Arlington customers.
The first phase of the project involved upgrading the equipment on four circuits located in mid-Arlington. In addition to rebuilding the infrastructure in the core of the town, we replaced cable feeding customers from the northern end of Arlington from an NSTAR substation in Everett.
The second phase of the project involved reconfiguring five existing circuits in Arlington so customers on these circuits could be fed from more than one direction in the event of outage or times of heavy electric use.
Phase three of the project continued the system improvements with the reconfiguration of five additional circuits in Arlington as well as the construction of a new circuit feeding customers in the south and eastern portions of the town. With new circuits bringing in power from the north, east and south, the last portion of the third phase involved building a new platform to feed Arlington customers from the western end. As a result, several hundred poles were installed in Lexington and Arlington to construct a new circuit into Arlington from an NSTAR substation in Lexington.
The final phase of the project, which began in August 2008, involves transferring the electric infrastructure onto the new poles.
To date the Arlington Electric Reliability program has converted several thousand Arlington customers onto a new electrical system as well as driven service reliability numbers to top quartile performance. However, our work is not complete. In the upcoming months our crews will continue working on the last phase of the project and transfer equipment onto poles to build a new circuit into the town.
The majority of the work will take place in the neighborhoods west of Park Avenue and south of Summer Street, between Summer Street and the Belmont town line.
While we perform a good deal of the maintenance work on the system without interrupting your service, this is not always an option for us. The safety of our employees is of the utmost importance and, at times, we will need to de-energize circuits in order to perform our work.
If scheduled improvements require us to interrupt your service, we will notify you ahead of time. And although we try our best to anticipate delays for these outages, sometimes last minute delays happen. We try to avoid such delays, but appreciate your patience if this occurs.
While you can call NSTAR's customer service line at
800-592-2000 if you have questions about our work, please
take the time to review our
Frequently Asked Questions page. It has the answers to
many of the commonly asked questions about our improvement
projects. We are committed to keeping customers informed
about the progress of this project. As work continues and is
completed, NSTAR will be regularly updating customers
through ads in local papers and this web site.
