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Surry-Yadkin Electric gets $7.5 million to upgrade grid
A $7.5 million federal grant will allow the Surry-Yadkin Electric Membership Corporation to upgrade outdated infrastructure that the utility says has caused more than 400 outages over the past five years.
The project is one of 58 nationally getting a combined $3.5 billion to strengthen grid resilience, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Wednesday.
At Surry-Yadkin Electric, the federal funding will support a series of grid upgrades including system monitoring, line replacements to increase capacity and deployment of an automated restoration system that quickly identifies and addresses outages.
Goals of the project include decreasing the duration, frequency and impacts of outages by 15%; reducing maintenance costs by $2 million over the next 30; and increasing overall electrical system capacity by about 500%, according to the utility, which serves nearly 28,000 members in Surry, Yadkin, Stokes, Wilkes and Forsyth counties.
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The work also will allow Surry-Yadkin Electric to tap grid data in real time to target damaged areas during outages.
The utility will kick in $7.7 million for the project.
“As a small rural electric cooperative with over 90% of our revenue falling on residential member-owners, the Department of Energy grant funding will help strengthen our reliability and service while minimizing the impact of the cost of maintenance and upgrades to our member-owners,” said Greg Puckett, executive vice president and general manager of Surry-Yadkin Electric. “We had a great team of employees working on the grant application, and we are thrilled for the co-op and its member-owners that we were chosen as a recipient.”
The $3.5 billion for projects in 44 states, funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law approved by Congress in 2021, is being administered through the U.S. Department of Energy Grid Resilience and Innovative Partnerships Program.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said it was the largest federal investment ever in grid infrastructure, supporting work that will harden electric systems and improve energy reliability and affordability.
Added funding from the recipients could push total related spending on grid improvement to $8 billion, she added.
“The grid, as it currently sits, is not equipped to handle all the new demand” and withstand natural disasters and other impacts of climate change, Granholm said at a news conference Wednesday. “We need it to be bigger, we need it to be stronger (and) we need it to be smarter.”
John Deem covers climate change and the environment in the Triad and Northwest North Carolina. His work is funded by a grant from the 1Earth Fund and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
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