ROCHELLE — At its Jan. 22 meeting, the Rochelle City Council approved its first large expenditures for its new Rochelle Municipal Utilities electrical substation project on the west side of town on Illinois Route 38. 

The council purchased switchgear for $2.672 million with a 77-week lead time and a transformer for $2.047 million with a 56-week lead time. Both purchases were impacted in price and lead time by supply chain issues, which RMU Superintendent of Electric Operations Blake Toliver said have been prevalent in the industry in recent years. 

The city is currently working on land acquisition for the substation project and doesn’t have an exact location yet. It will next work on procurement of pole line and conductor, as the project will include 10 miles of transmission line between the new substation and others at Ritchie Road and Twombly Road. The project will cost north of $20 million.

“We're still at the 18-month timeframe before the substation is constructed and finished,” Toliver said. “Right now I'd say the project is 15 percent complete, with the engineering work that's been done and the acquisition of the transformer and the switchgear.”

Toliver called the entire planning process for the new substation “difficult” due to lead times and prices along with changing easement language for poles because taller ones will have to be put in. Other hurdles will include conductor work, sizing, and working with ComEd due to a future expansion at the Twombly Road substation. 

Toliver said he was disappointed with the small number of bids the city received for the switchgear and transformer purchases and called 2024 an “unprecedented time” for lead times and availability of equipment. 

“To see only 1-2 bids was very disheartening,” Toliver said. “These companies used to love working with the smaller utilities and now it's getting harder and harder to procure these items. We're seeing it with other things too like bucket trucks with long lead times. We're going to the council and asking to purchase items that we won't even have for two, three and sometimes five years. But it's the only way to get these things purchased, by doing it now. The most challenging part of this entire process has been the lead times and costs. It's hard to go in front of the council with something that came in over the engineer's estimate. We try to get numbers as tight as possible to stay in line with our budget, but at the end of the day, you have to go with whatever's presented to you. When you only get one bid for a set of switchgear, that's what you have to go with. Because without it, the project doesn't move forward.”

In May 2022, the city completed a $13.8 million electrical substation project at 1630 Ritchie Court. That project was worked on through COVID-19 and ran into delays and supply chain issues as well. 

“That substation we just built, I'd bet if we did it five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost would have been 70 percent of what we paid,” City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh said. “But what are you going to do? We have to provide power to our customers and ensure that we have a reliable system for our major industrial customers. We have an obligation as a utility owner to make these expenditures.”

The basis for the new substation on Illinois Route 38 is to free up two power feeders that are currently tied up to feed one customer. The new substation will alleviate that congestion and make it to where RMU can serve residential customers more reliably. After completion, RMU will be able to backfeed power to areas in an outage. The substation will also allow for more possible industrial growth.

Toliver said that the current process of planning for the new substation is made easier by just having gone through the process for the Ritchie Road substation project. RMU built a layout that works at its last substation and knows what will be most convenient for linemen and the utility.

Fiegenschuh called the fact that RMU will build two substations in five years “amazing” and said he hasn’t seen anything like it in his career. Toliver spoke about RMU’s recent growth. 

“It is absolutely not a common thing to build two new substations in a 4-5-year span,” Toliver said. “From 1971 when we tied to ComEd, to 1998 when we built the Twombly Road substation, there were no major infrastructure upgrades with substations or anything. Rochelle has progressively grown in a 30-year timeframe substantially.”