The Tennessee Valley Authority is wrapping up construction on a $300 million power plant control center designed to withstand tornadoes, earthquakes and cyberattacks in a sparsely populated rural area of eastern Tennessee.

The TVA, a federal agency that serves about 10 million customers in the Southeast, is building the operations center to replace a decades-old control center in downtown Chattanooga. The new facility is heavily secured, with its location purposely chosen because of its distance from population centers.

The TVA facility is likely to serve as a model for the next wave of data centers that require the most sophisticated security protocols, architects and construction managers working on the project said during a recent guided tour. Commercial real estate developers and investors are racing to construct new data centers to meet soaring demand, according to the CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2024 report issued in June. But data center developers also must bulk up physical and digital security defenses for the properties.

“This is literally the brains of the TVA system,” Aaron Melda, TVA's senior vice president of transmission and power supply, said during an Aug. 9 tour. “So, that’s 16,000 miles of transmission lines, 500 substations and hundreds of power plants.”

The TVA control center is located on a 166-acre site at 490 Highway 58 in Georgetown, Tennessee, about 30 miles northeast of Chattanooga. TVA’s current control center is in the agency’s office complex in downtown Chattanooga, which it plans to vacate and possibly demolish. TVA wanted to move the control center out of an urban area because of the heightened risk of terrorist attacks.

Building construction is set to be substantially completed later this year, but the facility won’t be operational until fall 2026 as TVA conducts testing.

The centerpiece of the new facility is a central room where personnel will use digital connections and large video monitors to track all nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydropower and renewable energy production plants in TVA’s seven-state territory.

The command center is designed to provide greater levels of detail on the system’s performance and on local environmental conditions that TVA said will allow for more efficient operations and quicker response times when problems arise. About 200 employees will be assigned to the facility.

“We will be able to predict weather better,” Melda said during the tour. “You’ll have better capacity to predict consumer behavior and demand. And we’ll have greater operational capacity to dispatch the diverse fleet that we have.”

The two-story concrete structure is designed to withstand F5-class tornadoes, earthquakes that register up to six on the Richter scale and a “direct ballistic attack,” Melda said. An electric substation is located next to the building to provide a backup power supply.

“The technology that’s going in here, we will be able to predict all sorts of natural disasters before they occur,” Melda said.

Robert E. Lamb Inc. is providing architectural, construction management and engineering services for the project. TVA is serving as general contractor.