Alliant Energy details the cause of Tuesday night's outage

Alliant Energy says a switch problem at its Sixth Street Station caused Tuesday night's power outage in Cedar Rapids.

Technically ITC owns the lines, but Alliant operates them.

On the heels of that outage, Alliant says some new equipment will help make the system more reliable.

A giant substation essentially it takes the energy traveling on the really big lines and breaks it down for home use.

While this wouldn't stop outages like what happened earlier this week, Alliant Energy says it will make the system safer and more stable.

Tuesday night was supposed to be for catching up on TV.

"I was on the computer and watching Biggest Loser at the same time, multi-tasking. And poof," said Lisa Barfels.

A mis-timed switch on a major transmission line tripped a giant breaker.

"I just looked outside and the whole neighborhood was black," Barfels added.

In all, nearly 13,000 people spent a few hours without power.

Thursday, Alliant Energy opened a new substation to help handle electricity in the city.

"It helps us to protect areas, as an example, that aren't affected directly by an outage so it doesn't spread," said IPL president Tom Aller.

This is the seventh of 15 new substations Alliant is installing across Cedar Rapids.

It's a ten year project, and for each giant station like this, they'll take out up to six smaller stations, which are scattered across neighborhoods and parks.

In the end, Alliant is spending $70-million dollars to upgrade its system, which includes equipment like new lines and poles in some areas.

"These kinds of decade long actions are very expensive and ultimately, customers are going to have to pay for that," said Aller.

But Alliant can't just raise it's fees, they have to get approval from the state. And they're in the middle of one request right now.

In that request, they're asking for a 6 to 8 percent rate hike. They expect to know in January if they get it.

And Alliant said they expect to ask for more hikes in the near future, but weren't sure how big they would be.

Justin Foss, KCRG-TV