Alliant cautions downtown C.R. customers of upcoming outages

Downtown Cedar Rapids customers of Alliant Energy could still be in for one or two more power outages related, at least indirectly, to the massive flood of June 2008.

Alliant Energy is planning a series of outages on Sunday mornings this month as it prepares to switches customers over to a new downtown substation.

The new Downtown Industrial Substation behind the Five Seasons Parkade off First Avenue was built to replace an older substation within the Sixth Street Generating Station, which is being decommissioned due to extensive damage it suffered during the flood.

The outages will last about one hour. Some customers will experience one outage. Others will experience two outages, and still others will not be affected at all.

Alliant will notify those affected by letters and phone calls. Specific times, dates and the number of outages will vary by where they are located on the downtown electrical system.

The substation will be combined with the new River Run substation under development at the former Rescar site south of the downtown business district to provide more redundancy and better flood protection, according to Tom Aller, president of Alliant's Interstate Power & Light subsidiary.

“This substation is part of a larger plan to recover from the 2008 floods and protect our system from future flooding,” Aller said in prepared remarks.

The two substations will have a combined cost of about $25 million.

ITC Midwest, which provides transmission service in Cedar Rapids, is also in the midst of an upgrade that will provide the downtown and entire community with greater levels of high-voltage system redundancy.

The outages will also affect some traffic signals in the downtown area. Alliant reminded drivers to treat intersections with inoperable traffic signals as if they were a four-way stop.

The Sixth Street Substation in the old power plant will remain in service until August, when the last large industrial customers are switched over to the new substation, Alliant spokesman Scott Drzycimski said. The River Run substation is expected to go into service in early 2012.