Michigan public power utility Coldwater Board of Public Utilities has secured a $226,000 U.S. Department of Energy grant for building out grid reliability.
In a conversation with APPA, CBPU general manager Paul Jakubczak discussed how the grant will be used to address the public power utility’s most immediate resilience priorities.
CPBU initially applied for the grant in 2023, though didn’t secure funding during the first round. The utility then rewrote the grant request to more directly convey its potential benefits to the community when reapplying in 2024.
“Through the first round of grants, we learned quite a bit as far as what the grant process entailed. It entailed more than just telling our story and telling them what we needed additional funding for. It also had us look to make sure that what we were doing was appropriate and beneficial to the community,” Jakubczak said.
CPBU took a practical approach that centered on identifying the parts of its grid both in need of resilience boosting and presenting the greatest service risk were they to malfunction. This secured the grant and provided funding for two high-priority projects.
The utility “whittled down our scope to be two projects. One was the replacement of open wire secondary and the second was to replace some underground aging conductor as well,” Jakubczak said.
The grant also required the projects be completed by the close of 2027, with CBPU ensuring the award money would go toward the kind of faster-turnaround resilience bolstering the DOE is looking to support.
CBPU has taken an analytic approach towards planning its grid reinforcement and development projects, with Jakubczak noting that the projects receiving grant funding were evaluated to have the greatest payoff for service quality and reliability.
“It was easy to show the before and after numbers from a reliability standpoint. And that's how we chose the areas, we looked at data from the reliability tracker to determine where was the best bang for our buck,” he said.
Rather than necessitating a deviation from the utility’s project planning, CBPU was able to orient the grant funding around its overall strategic development goals.
“It falls right in line with everything that we're doing. Every year during budget time, like most utilities do, we’ll take a look at reliability and determine where the worst-performing circuits are, the worst performing neighborhoods are, and look at putting capital dollars to work in those areas. It's just going to be accelerated because of the additional funding,” Jakubczak said.
Coldwater has a higher than national average proportion of residents below the U.S. median income, and Jakubczak sees this usage of grant money as a way of ensuring CBPU’s lower-income customers continue receiving the reliable, affordable service the public power utility holds as a paramount responsibility.
The usage of this grant money in service of reliability projects has also been supported by the more technically advanced projects CBPU has completed recently, especially its drone inspection program that uses AI to identify vulnerable areas of the grid and flag them for repair in advance.
“We're also utilizing some of the data that we're receiving from our drone inspection program. Some of the areas that we will be doing the grant work are where we ran the drones through and found we had a lot of issues,” Jakubczak said.
This returns to CBPU’s focus on ensuring its investments — whether more technically advanced projects or routine grid reinforcement — all tie back to its goal of maintaining high-quality and affordable service.
“We're using this to assist with keeping the lights on for our customers, because that will always remain a priority,” Jakubczak said.
