EWEB gets $2.2 million for south Eugene wildfire hardening project
EWEB will use a $2.2 million state grant to replace aging Monroe Substation equipment, bury some lines and cut wildfire and outage risk in south Eugene.
The Monroe Substation area in south Eugene is getting a $2.2 million hardening boost that EWEB says will help protect against wildfire ignition, winter storms and tree-related outages. The project will replace roughly 30 power poles, thousands of feet of aging wire and equipment that has not been modernized since the 1950s, while moving some lines underground to reduce the chance that electrical infrastructure could spark a fire in high winds or other extreme weather.
For Eugene ratepayers, the grant matters because it will help offset part of the local cost of upgrading older infrastructure, even as EWEB must still provide matching funds under Oregon’s Grid Resilience Grant Program. The state program is backed by the U.S. Department of Energy through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the 2026 grant round selected nine Oregon electric utilities. EWEB has said the Monroe-area work must be finished by 2030.
EWEB resiliency program manager Jeannine Parisi said the goal is to remove possible ignition sources from the environment and eliminate the kind of sparking that could ignite a fire in dangerous conditions. System engineer Philip Peterson said modernizing the equipment should cut maintenance demands and help the utility get more use out of existing assets. The substation also will get relay upgrades so crews can better monitor current and voltage and more quickly identify the cause of outages.
South Eugene was singled out after EWEB consulted with Eugene Springfield Fire and the Oregon Department of Forestry, both of which identified the area as one of the places most in need of wildfire mitigation work. EWEB says its system runs through heavy tree canopy and serves several thousand customers in the wildland-urban interface, including parts of South Eugene. That makes the Monroe area a first-line beneficiary of the work, along with nearby homes, businesses and the critical infrastructure tied to the city’s water and communications systems.
The utility has warned that trees are a major cause of outages in Eugene and that its lines face growing pressure from age, climate change, severe weather, wildfires and earthquakes. In April 2025, EWEB approved an updated Wildfire Mitigation Plan that builds on its first plan in 2022 and uses fire-risk modeling, weather stations, grid hardening and equipment upgrades to reduce ignition risk and speed outage response. The Monroe project fits into a larger reliability push that includes more than 150 fault indicators, nearly $120 million in electric and drinking-water investment this year and about $1 billion over the next decade, with more than $600 million aimed at electric infrastructure alone.
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