At Delmarva Power, we care about the communities we serve, and we take seriously our commitment to delivering clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy for our customers and communities. Every day, work is being performed as part of our strategic effort to modernize and strengthen the local energy grid to better serve our customers. This effort includes dozens of targeted projects to install stronger utility poles and new, state-of-the-art equipment in communities across Delaware and Maryland. These upgrades continue to improve reliability for our customers by reducing the frequency and duration of outages.
Much of the work we do is focused on hardening our local infrastructure against more damaging winds and extreme flooding. Across our service area, we are continuing to see the impacts of more frequent and more severe weather driven by climate change. We are continually analyzing the local energy grid to identify critical infrastructure projects to help communities across Delaware and Maryland become more resilient to the impacts of storms and hurricanes.
To modernize the local energy grid and provide more reliable energy service for our customers in Chestertown and the Kent County area, we are planning critical enhancements to our substation on Morgnec Road in Chestertown, Md. Construction is scheduled to begin early 2021 and completed in early 2022.
Our existing substation must be modernized to meet the region's current and future energy needs. The project will create a more reliable and resilient connection between the regional transmission system and the local energy grid. This will improve the quality of energy service for local customers by reducing the number of outages that impact customers and allowing us to restore service faster.
We value input from our customers and communities and hosted a virtual community open house in September 2020. Please contact Renee Sheehy, Delmarva Power Public Affairs, at 443-235-7233 or renee.sheehy@delmarva.com with any questions.
September 2020 Open House Presentation
The rebuild will help us deliver energy more efficiently by creating a smarter energy grid with greater automation between local substations. In addition to adding stronger steel poles, we will also upgrade the existing transmission and distribution lines with new wire and other modern electric devices. The rebuild is expected to be completed by December 2019—weather permitting. For more information on this project, please review our project fact sheet.
The Red Lion to Hares Corner Transmission Line Upgrade is rebuilding a 50-year-old transmission line to improve the reliability of energy service for more than 12,500 customers in New Castle, Del. The project includes replacing aging wood transmission poles with new steel transmission poles on River Road in New Castle, Del. With the installation of new, state-of-the-art utility poles, the energy grid will be more capable of handling severe weather including hurricane-force winds up to 120 mph and blizzard conditions. The project Construction for this project is expected to begin in August 2020 and completed in December 2020. For more information on this project, please review our project fact sheet.
Learn more about how the local energy grid works.
