The Eugene Water & Electric Board will utilize $2.2 million in grants to update and harden parts of its infrastructure as extreme weather events such as ice storms and wildfires become more frequent.
The grants come from two rounds of Oregon’s Grid Resilience Grant program, and will cover undergrounding a handful of stretches of power lines, replacing aging equipment such as power poles and lines in outage-prone areas, and updates to the Monroe substation in Eugene’s Friendly neighborhood.
The substation update will include modern microprocessor relays; a device that senses problems in the grid and stops electrical delivery when necessary.
The current relays, which date to renovation work done in the 1980s, allow for either all or half of the substation to be depowered, affecting around 6,000 customers.
“If we change that control to be at the individual circuit level, now we’re talking several hundred customers,” said EWEB Principal Engineer Philip Peterson.
EWEB Resiliency Program Manager Jeannine Parisi said the area around Friendly was chosen because of its proximity to natural, wooded areas and important infrastructure, namely three EWEB reservoirs and communications equipment on Blanton Ridge that serves both local media and emergency responders.
“We are especially interested in protecting this critical infrastructure from wildfire risk,” she said. “And these investments: undergrounding, changing out poles and wires to stuff that’s more robust and stout is not just good for wildfire, but also year-round resiliency from winter storms and ice storms. We’re seeing more and more of those things.”
Peterson said work to improve resiliency, especially around wildfires, is important for all utilities. He said issues that commonly lead to utility-involved fires such as high voltage lines, plants that become fire fuel and strong winds are commonly associated with rural areas, but they can also happen in places like Eugene.
"All of those things work together to create wildfires, and thinking of them as a rural problem is wrong,” Peterson said. “I think we need to think about them in an urban setting where things are more densely packed."
The project will replace 30 power poles and more than 5,000 feet of wire over the coming years.
