40101(d) Program Awardees

Grant Amount: $1,171,399

Project Description: The City of Batavia will convert approximately 5.5 circuit miles of aging, overhead medium-voltage distribution lines to underground infrastructure. The project includes installation of two miles of three‑phase and 3.5 miles of single‑phase underground distribution lines, along with new pad‑mounted transformers, underground junction cabinets, and fault indicators.

Project Benefits: The project will reduce outage frequency and improve long‑term grid reliability by modernizing and undergrounding vulnerable infrastructure. These improvements will directly benefit approximately 2,500 electric customers, including 40 businesses. The project will also improve service to critical facilities including a fire station, an affordable housing complex, and a senior living residence. Anticipated operational improvements include a projected 50 percent reduction in outage frequency, a 45‑minute reduction in average outage duration, and fewer long‑duration service interruptions, particularly for customers who have historically experienced recurring outages.

Project Location(s): Kane County

Grant Amount: $681,888

Project Description: The Peru Phase 1 Resiliency Project will strengthen priority overhead and underground distribution lines along roads that serve a vital role in the City’s electrical planning. Improvements include reconductoring 1.5 miles of overhead double‑circuit lines and installing nearly a half mile of new three‑phase 35kV underground infrastructure connecting essential grid segments. The project will replace 36 distribution poles, install resilient wiring, utilize upgraded wood poles, and deploy technology to enable real‑time pole condition monitoring and improved preventative maintenance.

Project Benefits: The project will support reliable service for Peru’s approximately 10,000 customers. The improvements will reduce outage duration and frequency, mitigate impacts from severe weather events, and help lower energy burden for customers. The initiative will also support skilled jobs and provide workforce training to ensure personnel are equipped to operate and maintain upgraded grid assets. Prioritizing system improvements in historically underserved communities will advance equitable access to reliable electric service and support long‑term community resilience.

Project Location(s): LaSalle County

Grant Amount: $1,744,281

Project Description: This project includes construction of a new 10/14 MVA distribution substation operating at 12,470 volts within an 11‑square‑mile area in Marion, Illinois; comprehensive inspection and replacement of poles in the grassy substation area; and implementation of strategic vegetation management across the same service territory.

Project Benefits: These investments will significantly enhance system reliability and reduce outage frequency and duration. The new substation will reduce vulnerability to severe weather and equipment failure by increasing capacity to support current and future load growth, improving sectionalization, and enhance redundancy through additional back feed capabilities. Pole inspections and replacements will address weakened infrastructure and reduce emergency repairs following storm events. A proactive vegetation management strategy will reduce outage risks, help prevent wildfire hazards, and lower long‑term maintenance needs. Collectively, these actions will advance grid resilience and improve continuity of service for members across the region.

Project Location(s): Jackson, Johnson, Union, and Williamson County

Grant Amount: $1,132,500

Project Description: Jo‑Carroll Energy Cooperative will undertake a rural grid modernization initiative comprising four shovel‑ready projects designed to upgrade more than nine miles of aging overhead and underground three‑phase distribution lines across northwest Illinois. The effort focuses on converting legacy radial infrastructure into modern, looped, higher‑capacity circuits that provide improved operational flexibility and reliability.

Project Benefits: The improvements will deliver substantial reliability and safety benefits to rural communities that face increased vulnerability due to aging equipment, low population density, and limited service redundancy. Upgrades will reduce outage frequency and duration, strengthen voltage support, and enhance grid flexibility by increasing conductor capacity and improving substation connectivity. Relocating lines to accessible corridors will enhance worker safety and reduce restoration times during emergency events. By addressing infrastructure that, in some areas, exceeds 80 years in age, the project will improve service quality today while laying a foundation for future grid modernization technologies.

Project Location(s): Carroll and Jo Daviess County

Grant Amount: $2,748,200

Project Description: Tri‑County Electric Cooperative (TCEC) will deploy advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to improve grid reliability, support enhanced operational awareness, and expand demand‑side flexibility. The project will serve approximately 13,500 members across rural Southern Illinois. The upgraded AMI system will support faster fault isolation and restoration and bolster reliability for critical community facilities including hospitals, emergency shelters, water treatment plants, and schools.

Project Benefits: The project will enable quicker outage detection and response, enhance energy efficiency, reduce operational costs, and improve public safety by supporting earlier identification of electrical faults and infrastructure issues. TCEC’s service area spans 3,420 miles with an average of four members per mile, creating unique challenges for maintenance and storm recovery. Many communities served by TCEC experience more frequent or longer-duration outages due to geographic isolation and vegetation density. All 13,500 members will benefit from improved reliability and enhanced system resilience.

Project Location(s): Jefferson, Marion, and Washington County

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: $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