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The US Department of Energy through the Illinois Finance Authority is providing City Water, Light and Power $1.1 million towards a $1.6 million project to upgrade electric infrastructure in Springfield. The grant, which prioritizes funding to support reliability, innovation, and disadvantaged communities, was approved by the City Council last night. Work is set to begin by the end of this year and be completed in 2028. CWLP’s electric engineering group and crews will manage and complete all work in-house.
The funding supports CWLP’s efforts to modernize critical substation and electric distribution assets, improve service reliability, and shorten outage restoration times across the entire Springfield service area. Along with reducing outages, reducing truck time and emissions, and providing a more resilient and efficient grid for Springfield’s approximately 70,000 electric customers are other benefits.
“Improving reliability to our network of real time monitoring and automated response features is a great investment for our city,” said CWLP Chief Utility Engineer Doug Brown. “This is about restoring our customer’s power as safely and quickly as possible.”
Under this project existing facilities will be integrated with real-time monitoring equipment with ability for automated fault location, isolation, and service restoration features. This includes circuit breaker replacements at substations; reclosers on overhead equipment and switches in the underground distribution network. All upgrades are prioritized to impact the largest groups of customers first, delivering the biggest reduction in overall outages and restoration times.
