ComEd preparing for extreme heat, rain to hit northern Illinois’ grid

ComEd of Illinois declared itself reliable this week, and ready for whatever heat and rainstorms might come to northern Illinois this summer, following months of work on the region’s electric infrastructure.

“Extreme heat resulting from climate change continues to impact our service territory, but we are ready to meet those challenges,” Terence Donnelley, president and COO of ComEd, said. “The investments we are making to modernize the power grid are increasing our resilience to severe weather like heat waves.”

Both high temperatures – like the 90+ degree temperatures predicted for the days ahead – and storms can stress and knock out segments of a grid. However, ComEd said that it has launched a variety of programs, processes and updates to strengthen the local grid and prevent outages for its approximately 9 million customers. Some have already proven their worth, like the Distribution Automation technology, which reportedly helped to avoid more than 15 million customer outages, or an outage prediction tool using analytics to map effective preventative maintenance.

Grid improvements first became a priority for ComEd in 2011, and since then, it noted that its reliability has improved more than 80 percent. Practically speaking, it led to more than 19 million power outages avoided and more than $3.3 billion in related costs saved. For the company itself, all this led to achieving its best reliability on record last year, with 85 percent of its customers experiencing at most one interruption in service.

However, the company also pointed to a joint study conducted with Argonne National Laboratory last year that determined temperatures in northern Illinois will likely continue to rise alongside humidity as climate change’s effects continue to grow.