Rochester Gas and Electric has begun upgrades to a substation located in North Winton Village which serves about 6,500 residential and commercial customers including some in downtown Rochester.
The utility said that the rebuilding of the substation will increase its capacity and also make it more reliable.
Spokesperson Sarah Warren said the upgrade is needed because there is a lot more demand for power from that facility since it was first built decades ago.
“The area has grown tremendously since that substation was first constructed in the 1950s,” said Warren. “And the current infrastructure is at its capacity. So we needed to make these upgrades to ensure that we can meet growing power demands and make sure that we’re continuing to deliver safe and reliable power to our customers.”
Warren also said the upgrade will help build in some redundancy when power outages happen.
“We’re going to increase the substation’s ability to switch with adjacent circuits,” said Warren. “So what that means is, if a primary circuit that serves our customers goes down, we can feed them electricity through another path while we’re making repairs. So the amount of time our customers are without power can be decreased.”
RG&E said that there will be minor increases in construction-related traffic during the substation work. The project is expected to be finished by the end of 2022.
