40101(d) Program Awardees

Grant Amount: $266,137

Project Description: The City of Newton will complete their Line D Rebuilding and Reconductoring Project to address critical issues within its aging electrical infrastructure that is increasingly prone to failures. The project will enhance the reliability and resiliency of the City of Newton’s electrical grid by replacing outdated 60-year-old distribution poles, rebuilding and reconductoring approximately 1/2 mile of the 4kv distribution backbone feeder, and replacing aging copper wires with more efficient and reliable aluminum conductors. The project will also ensure a stable and efficient supply of electricity to critical municipal services, including City Hall, the Newton Water Treatment Plant, the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office, and the Newton Electric Department, ensuring the reliable operation of critical public safety and utility functions.

Project Benefits: The project will benefit 1,650 customers. It aligns with the goals of the federal Qualified Opportunity Zone program by fostering economic development and improving infrastructure in underserved areas and ensuring that underserved communities receive improved services, including reliability, resilience, and public safety. The City of Newton is designated as an Opportunity Zone under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Jasper County is one of the smallest counties in Illinois and the median household income in the City of Newton is $55,109, which is significantly lower than the State of Illinois median of $78,433.

Project Location(s): Jasper County

Grant Amount: $1,127,470

Project Description: City Water Light and Power (CWLP), the municipal-owned utility of the City of Springfield, serves 70,000 customers and is implementing a layered strategy to enhance grid reliability and resilience across both transmission and distribution systems. The project will involve deploying advanced technologies, including three-phase reclosers, vault-mounted switches, and compact modular reclosers, and replacing substation oil circuit breakers on the transmission and distribution system. These upgrades will improve fault detection, isolation, and restoration times, and will reduce outage frequency and duration while hardening the grid against disruptive events such as severe weather or equipment failures. All new technologies will be integrated into CWLP’s Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, which supports both Grid Management System (GMS) and Distribution Management System (DMS) operations, enabling real-time monitoring and enhanced grid management. The project also includes equipping CWLP staff with the necessary knowledge and skills to operate and maintain the new technologies.

Project Benefits: The project will benefit 70,000 customers, including many located in Equity Investment Eligible Communities (EIEC). The project will improve CWLP’s ability to directly mitigate the impact of grid disruptions, minimizing the scope and duration of outages and reducing energy burden for its customers. Furthermore, the initiative will maintain good-paying, safe jobs, and include workforce training to equip the staff with the skills needed to maintain and operate the upgraded grid infrastructure, ensuring long-term project sustainability. Additionally, prioritizing resilience upgrades in historically underserved communities will ensure equitable access to a stable and reliable power supply, which is critical for economic growth and quality of life.

Project Location(s): Sangamon County

Grant Amount: $1,775,714

Project Description: Egyptian Electric Cooperative Association (EECA) will implement an Emergency Equipment Share project, an innovative approach to addressing material shortages due to lengthened supply chain issues that can be replicated at other sites in Illinois and across the nation. The project will help partnering utilities to prepare and quickly recover from storm-related outages and reduce electric outage durations caused by climate-driven weather changes. This effort will also improve electricity reliability metrics by removing supply chain concerns for all participating partners and neighboring electric cooperatives. EECA will partner with Monroe County Electric Cooperative and Southern Illinois Power Cooperative, and will share the equipment with eight other neighboring small electric cooperatives when not in use by the partnering utilities. Emergency share materials will include: 1) substation materials (e.g., high voltage fuses, substation transformers, substation breakers, voltage regulators); 2) three phase overhead lines; 3) single phase overhead lines; 4) underground electric lines; and 5) electric service point materials.

Project Benefits: The project will impact over 70,000 electric cooperative consumers located in Southern Illinois. It will strengthen the resiliency of the local transmission grid, which extends over 1,000 miles into the 14 southernmost counties in Illinois.

Project Location(s): Alexander, Franklin, Jackson, Johnson, Massac, Monroe, Perry, Pope, Pulaski, Randolph, St. Clair, Union, Washington, and Williamson County

Grant Amount: $475,376

Project Description: Illinois Municipal Utilities Association (IMUA) serves over 40 municipal electric utilities across Illinois. The project aims to establish an Emergency Equipment Share Program) to provide an inventory of critical electric distribution system equipment that municipal utilities can draw on during emergency power outages. The project will create a hub of readily available, easy-to-access, and essential equipment that otherwise has a long lead time for delivery. All participating utilities will have access to a ready stock of emergency equipment at a warehouse in Springfield (including poles, cross arms, pole top transformers, and backyard easement machines), allowing utilities to restore power faster in the wake of derechos, large-scale fires, tornados, earthquakes, floods, and other major distribution system disruptions.

Project Benefits: The project will benefit more than 530,000 customers of small municipal utilities across more than 40 cities and villages in Illinois, including EIECs. The project will allow for a quicker restoration of downed distribution systems in the wake of a major power outage, ensuring key services remain intact to electric consumers affected by power disruptions. The project will also help municipalities rebuild their electric infrastructure faster after catastrophic events. Furthermore, quick restoration of power will help protect vulnerable populations from health hazards associated with prolonged outages (e.g., heat stress, freezing temperatures, food spoilage, loss of electric-powered medical devices, dangers associated with downed lines).

Project Location(s): Alexander, Bureau, Champaign, Clark, Clay, Clinton, Cook, Cumberland, DeWitt, DuPage, Effingham, Greene, Hamilton, Henry, Jasper, Jo Daviess, Kane, LaSalle, Madison, Massac, McDonough, Monroe, Moultrie, Ogle, Randolph, Sangamon, St. Clair, Wabash, Wayne, White, and Whiteside County

Grant Amount: $207,356

Project Description: MJM Electric Cooperative (MJM) will apply modern design and construction standards to build a tie between Rinaker and Palmyra substations for a more robust distribution system. The project will include right-of-way vegetation clearing along new and existing easements, as well as the construction and installation of underground and overhead electric lines. The project will create a loop to backfeed residents and businesses during outages at either substation, increasing resilience and hardening infrastructure in this area and significantly reducing the frequency and duration of outages.

Project Benefits: The project will benefit more than 1,100 rural customers in a larger coal mining community that has endured significant hardships and disadvantages throughout the last decades. This area is also prone to increased severe weather events, from record setting heat waves to more severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. Application of the tie-line will provide an interconnection between MJM substations and will provide much-needed resilience and system hardening for this area. It will also provide cost savings for the customers and decrease the number of trucks dispatched during a power restoration event.

Project Location(s): Macoupin County

Grant Amount: $543,232

Project Description: The SouthEastern Illinois Electric Cooperative (SEIEC) service area is located near the Shawnee National Forest. The Emerald Ash Borer, an invasive beetle, has attacked and killed virtually all ash trees in the Shawnee National Forest. These dead ash trees located near power lines increase the risk of outages and other hazards including wildfires. The project will perform tree trimming, tree clearing, and vegetation management in electric distribution system rights-of-way in the Golconda North substation. The project will address one of the leading causes of power outages in the project area and eliminate some of the key risks of forest fires in the nearby Shawnee National Forest.

Project Benefits: This project will increase electric service reliability for approximately 2,500 residents and small businesses located in a federal disadvantaged community, providing more affordable and reliable electricity. The project will provide good-paying and safe jobs and will reduce the risk of wildfires threat to the customers and to the Shawnee National Forest.

Project Location(s): Pope County

Grant Amount: $4,336,169

Project Description: Southern Illinois Electric Cooperative (SIEC) will deploy advanced technologies, including Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Geographic Information System (GIS), Outage Management System, and Meter Data Management System to replace its existing 20-year-old Automatic Meter Reading system and paper-based engineering recordkeeping. The project will modernize SIEC’s engineering and operations workflow through the implementation of advanced utility software. These upgrades will allow SIEC to implement improved software features for its members including time of use rate options, outage detection, and engineering analysis through near-real-time data on SIEC’s electrical distribution system, all of which will aid in future grid flexibility. The project will utilize outage management software alongside a GPS-accurate GIS model and modern AMI system to reduce outage duration, increase outage prediction accuracy, enhance SIEC’s resource allocation, improve customer communications, enhance data collection and analysis, and improve the coordination and control of distribution grid.

Project Benefits: The project will reduce the number and duration of outages for over 11,000 customers in the vulnerable population and several Illinois Restore, Reinvest, Renew (R3) areas, provide for enhances utility services and cost savings.

Project Location(s): Alexander, Jackson, Johnson, Massac, Pope, Pulaski, Union, and Williamson Counties

Grant Amount: $987,350

Project Description: Southern Illinois Power Cooperative (SIPC) will perform vegetation management on several transmission lines serving rural areas and EIECs. Over time, the overgrowth of vegetation along the transmission lines has reduced the functional rights-of-way (ROWs), increasing the risk of line faults, system damage, service interruptions, and failures. The selected clearing routes serve multiple distribution substations (including Ullin, Dongola, Mill Creek, McClure, Tamms, Olive Branch, and Pulaski). The removal and cleanup of vegetation within these prescribed ROWs will reclaim the sides and bottom of the ROWs back to their original 1980’s easement. The project will significantly reduce vegetation-related outages and benefit all members, particularly those in EIEC and critical facilities where interruptions and outages can be detrimental.

Project Benefits: The project will benefit more than 190,000 customers, including those in EIEC areas, and will reduce the number and duration of outages for customers and the critical public and commercial facilities served by the lines, including schools, water and irrigation facilities, water district transfer pumps, public safety services, cell towers, communications towers and television stations, local businesses, and residential areas located in and around disadvantaged communities. Many of these facilities require reliable power to provide essential services during extreme weather and grid-related events, as well as public services for large populations where power loss for extended durations would pose risks to public health and safety.

Project Location(s): Alexander, Hardin, Johnson, Massac, Pope, Pulaski, Union and Williamson Counties