For those of us in the Chicago area, that legislation has meant many many fewer power outages and the ensuing hassle that brings. During these recent storms, our power has gone off 4-5 times but has come right back on because of that controversial legislation passed by the GA (and vetoed by Quinn…if he had his way, out power outages would still be a nightmare up here).
#Time out communities springfield il how to
His job is to figure out how to build a safe system and let the elected leaders decide whether or not to make the investment.
Who is he to say what customers want? He’s an engineer. Brown simply doesn’t want to do the work.
I’d rather pay a rate increase to address the problem than a rate increase to simply restore the grid back to an extremely vulnerable status quo.ĬWLP and the city appear to be of the belief that having to rebuild substantial parts of the grid, just to have it destroyed again and again every 5-10-15 years is acceptable.Īlso, it sounds to me like Mr. Michelle Flaherty - Tuesday, Jul 11, 23 11:01 am: If they can do it downtown, they can do it elsewhere. The 10-year, $7 million undertaking is about two-thirds of the way complete, according to the city-owned utility. Turn the discussion to the possibilities of a bright future with a new direction.ĭowntown Springfield’s skyline is becoming de-cluttered, block by block.Ĭity Water, Light and Power crews have been burying unattractive power lines that run through downtown’s alleys for about eight years. Some actual leadership would be nice, for a change. These storms aren’t going to be any weaker or less frequent as time goes by. “I don’t think that they want to pay for that kind of a rate increase for.” “Where do you draw the line, you know, people say, we’ll bury the power lines that’s an enormous cost,” Brown said. Other infrastructure upgrades might be too far fetched going forward, though. Right now, the city learns that an area of the grid is down by hearing directly from customers.
The AMI technology would not have sped up the physical repairs but would have improved communication by automatically letting the utility know about outages, Brown acknowledged. “Any discussion,” Brown said, of further improvements, like burying power lines or installing Advanced Metering Infrastructure, or AMI, would be done “at enormous cost and with competing priorities, it would be up to the mayor and city council if we want to proceed in that direction in the future.” The utility, he said, is focused for now on returning the grid to the state it was in. SJ-R…Ĭity Water, Light and Power’s Chief Utility Engineer said the cost of the June 29 storm is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to the utility itself. * I usually try to avoid writing much about local Springfield matters, but this really jumped out at me.
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