Ameren announces new investment in Missouri to prevent outages

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Ameren Corp.'s division in Missouri will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fortify its electric grid nearly one year after two massive storms left more than 500,000 without power for days at a time.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that much of the money, $100 million a year for three years, will be used to bury miles of overhead power lines. An additional $28 million a year over the same period will go for more inspections and repairs to fix problems with poles and hardware before they fail.

St. Louis-based Ameren has 2.4 million customers in Missouri and Illinois. The AmerenUE division, which is making the investments, has 1.2 million customers in Missouri.

Ameren said the increased spending is part of a three-year, $1 billion initiative called Project Power On. The project includes more funding for tree trimming and $500 million to install pollution controls at a 40-year-old coal plant near St. Louis.

"We have always made investments, we just didn't talk about it," Thomas Voss, AmerenUE's chief executive, told the newspaper. "We realized that was a mistake."

The company said it has no plans to make a similar investment in Illinois, where customers also experienced last year's outages. Illinois customers are grappling with a steep jump in electricity prices after rate caps expired at the end of last year.

Ameren spent six months and met with more than 150 local officials and neighborhood groups while it developed its investment project, said Richard Mark, AmerenUE's senior vice president of energy delivery.

At a cost of $1 million a mile, the $300 million set aside to bury some overhead power lines will cover only a tiny fraction of the utility's 27,000 miles of existing overhead electric wire. Ameren also is encouraging cities to require underground utilities in new subdivisions.

Ameren is beefing up inspections of infrastructure by establishing a "foot patrol" of circuit inspectors who will walk neighborhoods in search of problems.

Missouri's Public Service Commission Chairman Jeff Davis said he is encouraged by some steps Ameren has taken over the past year.

"We need to see some results before we're really content with how things are going," Davis said. "It's going to take a little time, but I think they've gotten started on it. We just need to keep pushing and making sure that they're following through."

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Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com