The company states that since they took part in upgrading the power grid in 2012 there have been fewer outages in their service area. In the case of an outage, improved functionality has allowed electricity to be restored approximately 19 percent faster than prior to the modernization project.
This set of upgrades was spurred by the state's Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act (EIMA); the company has employed an additional 330 full-time employees and approximately 1,000 contract workers to support the project. The company expects to invest a total of $643 million over the 10-year project span.
“By all measures, the modernization plan is working for our customers and for Illinois,” Ameren Illinois President Richard Mark said. “Reliability has improved 17 percent, outages are down and good-paying jobs are being created at a time when our state sorely needs them.”
Ameren also stated that it is ahead of schedule in the installation of two-way meters that tracks the energy usage of a residence or business. Clients of Ameren will be able to utilize this information in how they can utilize more efficient amounts of energy and ring overall costs down. The company aims to deploy approximately 142,000 of these devices in 2015.
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