The Town of Greenwich has been faced with power outages not only as a result of extreme weather but also due to an over stressed powergrid.
The Town of Greenwich and CL&P held a press conference to outline the immediate and long term plans to help remedy the strain the outages which have continues to affect local residents and businesses.
I stood with Sen. Scott Frantz and Representatives Lile Gibbons and Fred Camillo to offer whatever support we could provide to expedite the project.
Kenneth Bowes, CL&P’s vice president of energy delivery services, said that though the entire project will take several years, it is anticipated that the system improvements to be done through this year will meet current demand.
The system CL&P improvement plans include upgrading, adding circuits and feeder lines to the Cos Cob substation, the substation at the Witco American Center off Route 120, near Route 684; the Byram substation, the Prospect Street substation, and the Sound Shore Drive underground system and repairs to underground cables on Fairfield Road.
The long term solution is to find a location downtown in Greenwich, where the demand is gratest,to build a new power substation. This location and project will need to be approved by the Connecticut Siting Council and will take a few years to fully design and execute the plan.
During the height of the outages, the town used emergency generators to operate its sewage treatment plants and private customers including Greenwich Hospital voluntarily switched to generators.
CL&P officials said that these improvements will NOT cause rate hikes for customers and they will reimburse both the town and a handful of commercial customers who were asked to use generators. According to Greenwich Hospital spokesman George Pawlush, the hospital used two generators for nearly 21 hours between Thursday and Saturday and paid $10,450 for 2,200 gallons of diesel to power the generators.
I will keep you updated on the progress of these projects.
