Midlands town preps for planned 3-hour power outage on Wednesday
One Midlands community will lose power on Wednesday, but there’s no need to call the power company. Dominion Energy says it’s part of the plan.
The town of Batesburg-Leesville will be without power in its downtown core for about three hours on Wednesday.
Power will be out between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. as crews from Dominion work on infrastructure improvements serving the town on the west side of Lexington County.
Town hall and the post office will be opening late, and businesses in the center of town along Church Street and Highway 1 around Hendrix Street will also be affected, Town Manager Jay Hendrix confirmed to The State. About 110 customers will be affected, according to the power company.
“Without power, wouldn’t even be able to take bills,” Hendrix said. “They have done a pretty good job of letting all the businesses know, but I imagine there will probably be somebody who hasn’t heard about it.”
The town of about 5,000 is currently fed from a single source, which makes it vulnerable to disruption if bad weather takes it out, said Brandon Ashley, vice president of transmission and delivery at Dominion Energy South Carolina.
“Going back to 2016-17, we started to rebuild our transmission system, and just last year we had our 8,000-volt distribution system converted to 23,000-volt distribution system,” Ashley said.
The new system will allow for a more reliable power supply feeding from multiple substations around the Batesburg-Leesville area, but it also requires that more than 100 transformers get replaced across the region. As the system is switched over, power will be temporarily dropped to each service area for the system to switch over.
All the new infrastructure is already in place for the section of downtown Batesburg-Leesville going dark on Wednesday, but crews were still moving forward this week with replacing older transformers around town, one pole and bucket truck at a time.
Ashley said Dominion has spent $13 million to refurbish its power transmission system stretching some 60 miles from the Lake Murray dam to the Savannah River, including the construction of new substations to supply the new voltage and provide more backups to the system to ensure it stays online.
It could take until the end of next year to complete all the necessary conversions of the area’s older transformers, Ashley said, but then the western part of the county will be less vulnerable to widespread power outages during storms or other extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene, which knocked out power to much of the area in 2024.
Upgrades also protect customers from the simple decay of an older system. One transformer crews removed this week had been powering one Leesville street since 1955.
“Since Helene, we’ve worked to educate customers on what it takes to provide them with service, even if you don’t see a crew on your street,” Ashley said. “It’s the backbone of everything, and this is a proud culminating moment for us.”
This story was originally published June 2, 2026 at 6:20 PM.
.jpg)