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By: Jeff Helfrich - Updated: 4 hours ago
ROCHELLE — After recently finishing its new $13.8 million electrical substation on Ritchie Court, the City of Rochelle has plans to build another substation on Centerpoint Drive on the west side of town off Illinois Route 38, City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh and Rochelle Municipal Utilities Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver said.
Toliver said the location has been chosen to provide reliability on that side of town and the MightyVine greenhouse has been getting “larger and larger” and has required increased power.
“We knew this was coming down the pipeline, that's why we've been preparing for it,” Toliver said. “We had to get the Ritchie Court substation built first before we could build this next one because it's going to be fed from it. This will relieve more load from our Caron Road substation and a little bit from our Twombly Road substation. And it's for more redundancy in that area.”
Toliver said he can’t yet speak to spec, size and cost of the planned substation. The city and RMU are in the process of potential load growth studies to determine things like transformer sizing and should know in “the next few weeks.”
Fiegenschuh said the project will have to go through design work and there are several large-scale projects at RMU’s power plant that are taking precedence first.
“I would assume after that, we'll begin the design phase of the new substation,” Fiegenschuh said. “We also have to look at purchasing some property out there and acquiring some easements to install the utilities. That could take a few years to get done."
The RMU power plant improvements will be a “huge step” in reliability for the downtown Rochelle area, Toliver said.
“We'll have a lot more redundancy for the customers in the downtown area,” Toliver said. “The utility is focused on its existing customers as well, not just new customers. Everybody always thinks we're building new things for everyone new coming in, we're not. We're also focused on what's already here and trying to make that more reliable.”
The recently-completed Ritchie Court substation has capacity for 120 megawatts of power. RMU’s existing substations on Caron Road and Twombly Road have 65-megawatt and 40-megawatt capacities, respectively. The city will have “well over 200 megawatts” of capacity total after substation work is all said and done.
“Right now, we're looking at about a 100-megawatt peak after Zekelman Industries is fully loaded,” Toliver said. “We'll have double that in capacity, which is good. You want to have enough room to grow, but you also want to have redundancy too."
Building two new substations in the span of a few years has been “a lot of work,” Toliver said, and it is unprecedented for the city and utility. He said he’s glad the city partnered with BHMG Engineering for the Ritchie Road substation, which helped RMU to find what would be best for its territory.
Fiegenschuh complimented the current and past mayor and city council members for their work to sell RMU’s transmission assets to ComEd in recent years to help fund the Ritchie Court substation. The city also issued $18 million in bonds for utility improvements last year at an interest rate of just over two percent.
“Because of things like that, this work has not required a rate increase,” Fiegenschuh said. “We were very lucky and timed it just right to be able to do this and cash flow it all without increasing our rates."
After the substation on Centerpoint Drive is eventually completed along with an expansion to RMU’s Twombly Road substation, $30 million will have been reinvested in the city’s electric utility in less than five years. Toliver called that level of investment “mammoth.”
The last big substation expansion RMU did was in 2015 at the Caron Road location, Toliver said. Before that, expansions were done in 2005 and 1997. He thanked the mayor, council and Fiegenschuh for their support of the most recent improvements.
“At the end of the day, our job is to service our customers, current and future,” Fiegenschuh said. “These improvements needed to be made, especially for our current customers. When people locate in an area to do business, one of the things they rely on, especially if they're a large power user, is reliable power. This is going to ensure we have that reliable power well into the future. Our number one priority is our customers."
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