Santee Cooper has secured final approval for 14 projects, totaling $6.9 million in funding, submitted to its Grid Resilience Grant Program last year by electric cooperatives and municipal and other utilities from across South Carolina.
Together, the projects represent grid improvements that will reduce the number of outages and improve restoration times during extreme weather events, primarily in disadvantaged areas of the state, Santee Cooper said on Aug. 21.
Santee Cooper is the state-owned public power utility in South Carolina.
Santee Cooper is serving as the state administrator for the formula grant provided to South Carolina through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, section 40101(d).
As part of the selection process, Santee Cooper and an independent consultant, Guidehouse, reviewed and scored the project submissions.
The scoring criteria was based on metrics included in the RFP.
The selected projects submitted to and approved by the U.S. Department of Energy reflect funding available for federal fiscal year 2024. The DOE approval clears the way for project work to begin.
“These 14 projects represent a powerful step forward in strengthening South Carolina’s electric grid, especially in communities that are most vulnerable to outages,” said Jimmy Staton, President and CEO of Santee Cooper. “We’re proud to partner with the Department of Energy and utilities across the state to deliver smarter, more resilient energy solutions for South Carolinians.”
The awarded projects are:
• City of Clinton - $445,200 - Vegetation management, outage management and pole inspections.
• City of Rock Hill - $397,123 - Installing new underground electric lines, equipment and lighting in a 10-foot easement acquired from affected property owners. Old overhead lines will be converted to new underground lines and old infrastructure will be removed.
• Fairfield Electric Cooperative - $99,000 - Implementing a comprehensive Fault Indicator System to enhance grid resilience by enabling rapid detection, precise location and efficient management of faults.
• Fairfield Electric Cooperative - $210,000 - Installing seven three-phase electronic reclosers on a distribution circuit from Fairfield's Winnsboro substation.
• Fairfield Electric Cooperative - $330,000 - Installing 11 three-phase electronic reclosers on a distribution circuit from Fairfield's Woodward substation.
• Greer CPW - $1,047,000 - Increasing system automation capable of providing real-time data during events, fault identification, fault isolation and service restoration during extreme weather events and other outages.
• Laurens CPW - $1,347,097 - Replacing the primary and secondary electric distribution lines with new conductor and accelerating vegetation management in the disadvantaged communities of the city.
• MPD Electric Cooperative - $319,104 - Installing distribution management and automation systems. Compact Modular Reclosers will be installed, along with Remote Control Units, in order to automatically clear instantaneous and short duration faults.
• MPD Electric Cooperative - $286,045 - Increasing grid resilience in rural communities by upgrading existing single-phase electrical lines to either V-phase or three-phase configurations to improve the efficiency and reliability of the power distribution system.
• MPD Electric Cooperative - $720,043 - Replacing old or damaged utility poles with new poles to enhance reliability and safety and updating infrastructure to lower the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) and Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI) during normal and extreme events.
• Orangeburg DPU - $689,721 - Implementing remote sensing solutions for vegetation; replacing transmission conductors and poles, insulators, static lines and other ancillary material; replacing older electrochemical recloser with a new electronic device.
• York Electric Cooperative - $539,956 - Changing existing Power-Line-Carrier (PLC) meters to Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) meters.
• York Electric Cooperative - $479,921 - Changing existing PLC meters to AMI meters.
• York Electric Cooperative - $73,488 - Creating a Distribution Automation system between York Electric's substations.
