The Eugene Water & Electric Board will utilize $2.2 million in grants to update and harden parts of its infrastructure as extreme weather events such as ice storms and wildfires become more frequent.
The grants come from two rounds of Oregon’s Grid Resilience Grant program, and will cover undergrounding a handful of stretches of power lines, replacing aging equipment such as power poles and lines in outage-prone areas, and updates to the Monroe substation in Eugene’s Friendly neighborhood.
The substation update will include modern microprocessor relays; a device that senses problems in the grid and stops electrical delivery when necessary.
The current relays, which date to renovation work done in the 1980s, allow for either all or half of the substation to be depowered, affecting around 6,000 customers…