Initial Survey of Chicago Worst Performing Circuits

On August 10th, 2023, the Advanced Energy Group (AEG) brought together industry, government, community organizations, and university leaders in the energy and climate space to discuss the most pressing challenges surrounding grid modernization in the Chicagoland area. At the meeting, a specific challenge with a 12-month plan of action was identified.

A full resource page on the meeting can be found here:   https://goadvancedenergy.com/cae-23q3-grid-modernization. 

The electricity grid's reliability is critical to all of Chicago’s citizens. Most customers have experienced fewer instances of losing power over the last 10 years. However, some customers live in areas where they continue to experience relatively higher numbers of outages. North Lawndale is one such area.  We have launched a Task Force comprising industry volunteers to consider what actions can help North Lawndale benefit from ongoing “grid modernization” efforts to make the electricity grid more reliable.

After the completion of our  90-day goal  by supporting North Lawndale to apply for a $1.5 million workforce development program, we worked to map the worst-performing circuits throughout Chicago. These initial maps can be seen below which have been essential in identifying the circuits and communities in greatest need of attention.

Since the beginning of this task force, a looming hypothesis has been considered:

Do environmental justice/disadvantaged communities experience more substantial outages?

The answer to this exploration has been a resounding yes. Looking at the location of the worst-performing circuits in Chicago, below, you can see that all the worst-performing circuits that have issues year after year are located in environmental justice communities. The following communities are the most affected by these circuits:

• Roseland
• Washington Park
• South Deering

Feel free to explore the maps below by clicking on each point and exploring the different Chicago neighborhoods and EJ tracts.

With the information present in the above maps, a few areas of further exploration become immediately apparent:

1. Request for additional data from ComEd to identify further neighborhoods of interest, and more recent data, and determine the cause of each outage.
2. Add layers for critical health infrastructure, education institutions, commercial districts, and  CMAP  planning in identified communities.
3. Work to improve these worst-performing circuits using the  Illinois Climate Bank's Grid Resilience Grant ,  EPA’s Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants program , and/or  DOE's Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) .

These grant proposals will focus on community-based initiatives for improving grid resiliency and reliability in the following communities:

• North Lawndale (continued support)
• Roseland (identified by worst performing circuits map)
• Washington Park (identified by worst performing circuits map)
• South Deering (identified by worst performing circuits map/ AEG Clean Ports Program )
• Franklin Park ( AEG Clean Ports Program )

If you want to be involved in the next steps of this process, join us on August 8th, 2024 for our next stakeholder challenge on grid modernization. Register  here .

Publicly  reported  data from ComEd created the circuit map seen in this story map. Of the circuits identified by ComEd as the worst performing circuits from 2018-2022:

• 44/250 circuits have location data (17.6%)
• 44/90 of the multiyear worst-performing circuits are mapped (48.8%)

The circuits with mappable data were included in these maps.

This story map features a collection of data from the EJScreen and Justice40 Atlas. The EJScreen data was sourced from   https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/   using the ArcGIS REST endpoint. The  shapefile for Chicago neighborhoods  was taken directly from the  Chicago Data Portal.