The U.S. Department of Energy has granted the Marblehead Municipal Light Department a $1,328,253 federal grant to update utility infrastructure.
MMLD General Manager Jon Blair said the federal funds will be dispersed to the department by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and will be used to service 23-kilowatt transmission lines.
The project will move the transmission lines underground.
Marblehead is dependent on these transmission lines, which deliver power from the National Grid’s Railyard Substation in Salem to Marblehead, according to Blair.
Funds will also be used to convert wooden utility poles to steel utility poles at National Grid’s Railyard Substation, he said.
The federal grant is funded by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Blair said.
The total cost of the projects is approximately $2 million, according to Blair. Additional funds required to complete the project will come from the MMLD’s internal budget, generated by rate-payer revenue.
Blair said both projects will strengthen Marblehead’s power supply system and make it “more resilient to things like lightning strikes or weather interference.”
He added moving the transmission lines underground will “increase resiliency against things like storms or other interference” that would disrupt electrical service in Marblehead.
He said MMLD expects there to be “higher reliability and more resiliency against things like strong storms. But in terms of the actual power that’s delivered or things that should be noticeable to customers, we don’t anticipate any practical day-to-day difference in the service they receive.”
Blair added, “The vast majority of outages that we experience, whether it’s on the transmission side or on the distribution side, are caused by weather, vegetation, or animals. So, by moving those wires from something that’s exposed and out in the elements to something that is protected under 3 feet of soil, it removes all those variables.”
To secure the grant, MMLD partnered with the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company.
Blair said MMWEC is a “joint action agency that advocates for (MMLD) and helps to provide some bench strength to our staff and our expertise.”
He added that MMWEC was “instrumental in helping to organize this.”
Blair said, along with these infrastructure updates, MMLD is “keeping an eye toward future load growth.”
“We anticipate that we may need to expand our transmission capacity at some point in the coming decades, and so for that, we’re building this new infrastructure, not necessarily to expand that capacity concurrent with the project, but to accommodate what we anticipate to be future expansion,” he said.