S. WHITEHALL TWP., Pa. – Inside PPL’s Walbert Training Center in South Whitehall Township, part of a $100 million project to upgrade equipment was showcased on Wednesday.
About half of that money is coming from a U.S. Department of Energy grant. PPL Electric Utilities president Christine Martin said the company is about 50 percent done with work stemming from the grant.
“We’re continually investing to replace aging infrastructure to improve technology and innovation, so it is continual,” said Christine Martin, president of PPL Electric Utilities.
U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Katie Jereza stopped by the company, getting a look at the work being done.
“It’s really about proactive and responsiveness, so that we can avoid outages, but if we do have them, they can respond quickly, so these are the most innovative technologies that we have and it’s nice to see it in action,” said Assistant Secretary Jereza.
According to PPL, this work will prevent and shorten power outages, improve system reliability and reduce maintenance costs, provide real-time visibility into the grid and support increased connections of distributed energy resources and electric vehicles.
“Totaling in our system over the next several years, we will be investing as PPL Electric Utilities about $8 billion in our transmission and distribution system. That includes storm hardening, resilience, smart grid, all of the technologies that you’ve seen today,” said Martin.
“Oftentimes we’ve found the same type of technologies we’re seeing here are reducing outages as much as 50 percent, and that’s exciting to see,” said Assistant Secretary Jereza.