The city of Rochelle is moving toward construction on a new electrical substation project for Rochelle Municipal Utilities on Centerpoint Drive off Illinois Route 38 west of town, RMU Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver said Nov. 19.

At its Oct. 27 meeting, the Rochelle City Council approved a $7,673,358 bid from Tri-City Electric Co. for the construction of the substation. At its Nov. 10 meeting, the council approved five easement agreements totaling $403,273 for the project, which will also see overhead lines run from RMU’s Ritchie Road substation to the new Centerpoint Drive substation.

Toliver said the next steps will include the city council considering bids for steel utility poles at its Dec. 8 meeting and bids for the line construction at a meeting in January. He hopes the construction of the line and substation will be substantially complete by the end of 2026.

In early 2024, the city council purchased switchgear for $2.672 million and a transformer for $2.047 million for the project, which is expected to cost around $20 million total. The project will be cash-funded using RMU reserve funds and will have no impact on customers’ electric rates, Toliver said.

The new substation project will be RMU’s second in six years. The city completed a $13.8 million substation on Ritchie Road in May 2022.

“Many, many hours have gone into this project,” Toliver said. “It’s been three years in the making to bring this substation to fruition. The day after we energized the Ritchie Road substation we started planning for the Centerpoint Drive substation.

“It takes a lot of work behind the scenes with engineering, planning, stormwater issues and more to make sure this is a successful project for RMU and its customers. For this substation we have to build about five miles of line to be able to energize it, and that’s where the extra cost is coming in.”

The new steel utility poles will run from Ritchie Road to Steward Road to South Main Street to Jack Dame Road to Illinois Route 38 to Centerpoint Drive. The portion that runs along South Main Street behind the Lake Lida subdivision will be run underground, Toliver said.

The new substation will improve power redundancy on the western edge of RMU’s service territory, Toliver said. MightyVine, a greenhouse tomato farm at 222 Centerpoint Drive, is currently supplied with power by two of RMU’s existing feeders, which are more designed for commercial and residential load.

“MightyVine is very much an industrial load,” Toliver said. “Having this 34.5kV tie out to that area will help alleviate the loading constraints we have on the two feeds out there currently as well as allow for extra development to happen in that industrial park out there. If another industry wanted to come in, it wouldn’t negatively impact any of the residential customers that are fed off of those lines.”

The new substation will allow for about 50 additional megawatts of growth on the west side of RMU’s territory, Toliver said.

Rochelle City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh thanked Toliver and RMU electric team, City Attorney Dominick Lanzito and the city council for their work on the project so far.

“This project has been three years in the making,” Fiegenschuh said. “We went from building one substation to moving on to this one. It’s been a process, but that’s why we have a great team in place, to get this stuff done. I’m super excited about the project. For a town of 9,000 people, building two substations in six years is pretty remarkable.”