The new Marshall County REMC Marco substation, located just east of Michigan Road south of Argos, is now complete and in service. The need for this new, $5.5 million substation was identified by our engineering firm, Alpha Engineering, back in 2020 as part of our long-range planning. 

This new substation is owned by Wabash Valley Power Alliance, Marshall County REMC’s wholesale power provider. The Marco substation replaces the old NIPSCO delivery point that previously provided power to Marshall County REMC members in the southern part of the county. 

In the past, Marshall County REMC purchased power from a NIPSCO-owned substation that is located right next door to the new Marco substation, but over the years, our power needs have outgrown the capacity of the NIPSCO substation/delivery point. Because of this constraint, Marshall County REMC has for years been powering the southeastern part of the county from our REMC-owned Lawrence substation, located on King Road just south of 11th Road in Plymouth. 

While this allowed us time to get the new substation built and in place, it has not been ideal from an electrical engineering perspective because it created long circuits going all the way from Plymouth to Tippecanoe and Mentone that were difficult to troubleshoot during outage situations because of the drive time to inspect the circuits for damage. Also, these long circuits required much more equipment to overcome voltage drop at the end of the line because of the distance the power was traveling. 

With the new Marco substation in place, these long circuits feeding the southeast part of the county have been eliminated by switching the load off the Lawrence substation over to Marco. Members in the southern part of the county should now have better power quality, reliability and quicker outage restoration times!