by Rebecca Walker — April 6, 2011—Dominion Virginia Power plans to spend more than $1.7 billion over about a two-year period to strengthen its electric grid, support growing demand for electricity and improve service reliability for its 2.4 million customers.
Service reliability — as measured by time affected by an outage not caused by a major weather event — improved 15 percent between 2003 and 2010 for the average customer. Hurricane Isabel devastated Virginia in 2003.
The $1.7 billion for reliability projects is part of $7.4 billion in infrastructure expansions and improvements announced earlier by the company. Other investments are for new power stations to meet growing customer demand for energy, environmental improvements and other projects.
Dominion Virginia Power has approximately 61,000 miles of transmission and distribution power lines, 900 substations, 566,000 transformers and 1.1 million utility poles.
This group of reliability improvement projects began in 2010. Many are scheduled for completion this year.
For more information, see the Web site.
