January 06, 2012|By Julie Wernau | Tribune reporter

Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison Co. has plans to spend an extra $233 million in 2012 to upgrade aging cables and poles and install smart meters for utility customers. That expenditure is over and above ComEd’s typical $918 million a year spend for capital improvements and comes as a result of landmark legislation passed in late 2011 that will wrap the $2.6 billion cost to upgrade the grid and add smart grid technology into the electricity bills of Illinois consumers.

On Friday, the company filed a 10-year plan with the Illinois Commerce Commission to spend $1.3 billion to strengthen its electrical system against outages. The plan also proposes spending $1.3 billion to add high-tech devices to the grid that they say will automatically restore power outages, eliminate the need for meter readers and give consumers more control over electricity usage.

ComEd will spend $139 million in 2012 to harden electrical lines against storm damages, replace 460 miles of underground cable in 2012, inspect 4,000 manholes and inspect 133,400 wood poles.  It will also spend $94 million in late 2012 to begin its rollout of smart grid technology.

In the first year, ComEd said it plans to install 130,000 meters in its territory and average another 440,000 meters annually until each of the 3.8 million customers in its territory is equipped with the devices. Smart meters can come in various forms, but generally allow consumers to see how much electricity they are using in real time and how much that electricity is costing.

At the same time, 470 so-called distribution automation devices will be installed in 2012, the company said, a technology that allows ComEd to automatically reroute power around problems on the system. Eventually, 2,600 such devices will be installed, the company said.

In essence, consumers who would normally wait hours and possibly days for ComEd to send a truck out to the origin of an outage would now be served by power that has automatically been rerouted from other areas. The nuisance associated with an outage would be “a few blinks of the lights” instead of a longer blackout, said Michael McMahan, vice president of smart grid and technology for ComEd.

To aid smart grid, one of ten substations will be upgraded in 2012 to allow ComEd to control automation in the area where the devices are installed. The substation would be the second such upgrade in ComEd’s territory. Oak Park also has a smart substation and is part of a so-called “innovation corridor” of nine suburbs and the Humboldt Park area of Chicago ComEd is using to test out smart grid technology.

That corridor is now planned to become a testbed beginning in 2012 where entrepreneurs may test smart technology on a real-world, utility scale. ComEd said innovators will apply to participate and will foot the costs to purchase the technology and install it on the system.

jwernau@tribune.com | Twitter: @littlewern