A quarter million in congressionally directed spending will go toward building out an emergency operations center in Moscow village.
This $245,000 funding, earmarked by Sen. Bernie Sanders, is part of a larger tranche of funding doled out over the years to the utility, specifically directed by the senator. This new funding is in addition to the $1.2 million directed to them in 2022 to bring the Moscow Village Mill and its hydroelectric facility back to life after it lay dormant for over a decade.
Stowe Electric also recently received a $75,000 historic revitalization grant to structurally shore up the Moscow Village Mill as well.
This new amount of funding will help fully modernize Stowe Electric’s ability to coordinate its emergency response capabilities, a critical function for utilities as high-energy storms with potentially devastating impacts increase in frequency.
“The emergency operation center will allow our dispatch to monitor outages, communicate with the field, provide input to our customer service folks, monitor production of the hydro facility and just overall system operations,” general manager Jackie Pratt said. “Right now, we’re kind of distributed throughout the building here in the office, so with the creation of the emergency operation center, the key people for dispatch and emergency response when we have outages are going to be in that room together.”
The center will be built out on the millwright’s office’s second floor with the third floor dedicated to an enhanced server center to power these operations. The utility is still contemplating how best to make use of the first floor.
“Vermont is such a small state, and there’s such a connection that we have here in Vermont with our legislative delegation,” Pratt said. “That’s really valuable, that we’re able to get the attention of somebody like Sen. Sanders and bring some of that congressionally directed spending here to help the community overall and our ratepayers and facilitate better emergency response.”
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