Chick-fil-A adds East Ridge unit
Chick-fil-A’s expansion in Tennessee continues with a groundbreaking Monday at its new East Ridge restaurant, the second of six locations the chain expects to open in the Volunteer State this year.
The new 4,999-square-foot restaurant at 639 Camp Jordan Parkway will be the first stand-alone restaurant in the Jordan Crossing development. The Chick-fil-A, owned by Heath Kyle, is expected to be built and open by the spring and will offer indoor seating for 120 and additional patio seating for 12, as well as a two-story playground for children.
The interior will feature the chain’s heritage restaurant interior design that showcases handmade, authentic materials for a vintage-inspired interior, including a large gathering table made from reclaimed wood, subway tiles, and a light fixture made from recycled Coca-Cola bottles.
When it opens, the location is expected to create upwards of 85 new jobs.
Frigid weather boosts power use
With temperatures across the Tennessee Valley below freezing for all but four hours in the past five days, the Tennessee Valley Authority supplied over 600 gigawatt-hours of energy for each of the last five days – the second longest streak for such a volume of sales in the 85-year history of TVA.
The only time TVA has had a longer period of such high power use came in January 2010 when a prolonged cold spell kept electricity consumption above the 600 gigawatt-hour level for 10 straight days.
How much is 600 gigawatt-hours? That’s over 600 million kilowatt-hours – enough power to supply the average home for 40,000 years.
TVA spokesman Scott Fiedler said TVA set a holiday record for power sales on New Year’s Day and reached a winter peak of 31,740 megawatts Tuesday when temperatures across the Tennessee Valley averaged only 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
On Friday, frigid temperatures pushed up power demand for the Tennessee Valley Authority to 29,329 megawatts when the temperature averaged 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the TVA region.
A majority of homes and businesses in the Tennessee Valley are heated with electric furnaces so the colder weather pushes up power consumption as furnaces operate more and at higher loads as temperatures drop.
Inspections up for electronic devices
The government inspected a record number of international travelers’ electronic devices last year, expanding a practice that has drawn alarm from privacy advocates.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it inspected 30,200 phones and other electronic devices in fiscal year 2017 – a nearly 60 percent spike from 2016. The government said the spike is due, in part, to the fact that people now carry more devices, often several at a time.