ROCHELLE — During Rochelle Mayor John Bearrows’ bi-monthly update on Thursday he was joined by City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh and State Rep. Tom Demmer on Facebook live for discussion that involved utility issues and federal COVID-19 fund use. 

During last week’s city council meeting, a net metering policy was passed for residents and small commercial business customers of Rochelle Municipal Utilities that want to install solar panels in the future. RMU will be giving a credit back to customers that generate more power than they need that gets put back onto RMU’s grid. New energy legislation passed by the state last year required cities with public utilities to pass net metering and interconnection policies. 

RMU customers that generate solar power that goes back onto RMU’s grid won’t receive a full “one-to-one” credit due to the city needing to pay expenses of maintaining its power grid.

“We’re essentially giving them a credit for our wholesale power cost,” Fiegenschuh said. “We’re not giving them a larger credit because we still have a distribution system to run. If they’re not producing power 100 percent of the time, then they’re using power off of our distribution lines and we have to pay our linemen. We have to maintain our system.”

Last year’s energy bill legislative process saw impacts on the area when the fates of the Prairie State Energy Campus, which the City of Rochelle is a part owner of, and the Byron Nuclear Plant were on the table. An eventual bill kept Prairie State open until at least 2038 and Byron was kept open after a September 2021 closure was possible. 

“Energy policy has been at the forefront on the state level quite a bit over the past couple of years,” Demmer said. “And now there are some local decisions being made on zoning and siting for solar farms. We’ve been dealing with wind farms for years, but there’s upgrades happening on those now. The energy world shows just how interconnected a lot of these decisions are.”

Bearrows and Fiegenschuh both stressed that they’re in favor of renewable energy during the bi-monthly update and discussed the importance of moving towards it in a thought-out fashion. 

“It’s very complex and it may be the wave of the future, but what scares me is the more we talk about electricity and try to gear more towards solar and wind and electric cars are coming online more,” Bearrows said. “It’s just a lot of change. It’s not that we’re against it. We’re not opposed to making these changes, but we have to have time to work into the changes. You can’t just flip the switch overnight.”

Fiegenschuh said he believes more electric cars in the future will put a greater burden on electric distribution systems like RMU’s. That will call for upsizing transformers and line sizes.

COVID-19 funds

When asked about the state’s biggest challenges in the future, Demmer discussed how the state, counties and cities will spend federal COVID-19 relief dollars. He called it an “unprecedented” amount of money and said there have been a lot of different ideas on what to do with it. 

The funds are subject to some restrictions by the federal government on what they can be used or. Local governments will have to find the most responsible ways to spend the money. Demmer said he’s been trying to get more transparency on how the money is spent to prevent unethical actions. 

“Those are important decisions,” Demmer said. “First, every decision about how we spend taxpayer dollars is important and we should pay close attention to how we allocate those dollars. These are one-time funds and they’re really significant. It’s a meaningful amount of money. That will be a challenge over the next year.”

Fiegenschuh agreed with Demmer about the money amount being unprecedented. The City of Rochelle received $1.2 million in federal dollars and the city council has approved what to spend it on.

“We’re going to use them on what was named in the act: water, infrastructure, storm sewer improvements and we’re actually talking to Habitat for Humanity about doing some kind of project where we provide some assistance to low-income residents to do energy efficiency upgrades to their homes and we’re working with landlords on those in apartments,” Fiegenschuh said. “I applaud what we’re doing with the dollars. We’re going to send a brochure out so people can see what we’re spending it on.”