ComEd customers have footed the bill for billions of dollars spent by the utility in recent years to keep power on during extreme weather, yet 2.4 million homes lost electricity during storms this year alone. Now the utility says it needs to raise more than $15 billion through rate increases to handle rising demand and intensifying storms linked to climate change.
The request comes on top of $4.4 billion already being spent on a previously approved initiative to strengthen the electric grid across Northern Illinois. As a regulated utility, ComEd must apply to the state of Illinois for any rate increases, and it has done so regularly over the past two decades.
The stakes are high. In nearby Gary, Indiana, residents were left without power for two weeks after a storm with the velocity of a Category 2 hurricane tore through the city. Many blamed the Northern Indiana Public Service Co. for not protecting power lines and utility poles from tree damage ahead of the storms.
Gary should be a warning to all utilities, said Sarah Moskowitz, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, an Illinois watchdog group. It is their duty to cost-effectively maintain the system and preserve affordability.
In Chicago this year, ComEd reported 336,000 outages, most concentrated on the South Side and Southwest Side. In June, more than 900 customers in Englewood lost power for three or four days after a storm downed thousands of trees. In July, South Deering resident Renee Rudder lost electricity for a day and a half, forcing her to rely on a supply of flashlights and candles.
ComEd said the number of outages this year would have been more than double had it not made technology improvements. The utility has installed more than 10,000 devices that can automatically sense power disturbances, isolate problems and restore electricity. Those upgrades helped avoid about 2.7 million additional outages this year, according to Dale Player, the utility’s vice president of engineering and smart grid.
Weather planning and response is now a bigger part of ComEd’s operations than ever before, as climate change drives more frequent and severe storms across the region.
