Orange and Rockland invests $315 million to harden Hudson Valley grid

Orange and Rockland Utilities is putting $315 million into its electric system this year, with major projects in Warwick and Woodbury that the company says are meant to limit outages before the next round of summer heat and severe storms hits the Hudson Valley.

The biggest local payoff for Orange County comes from a $65 million substation on State School Road in Warwick and a $102 million substation on Forest Avenue in Woodbury. Construction on both projects began in spring 2026, and O&R says both are expected to be energized in 2027. The utility is also spending $255,000 on overhead-line upgrades in Wurtsboro, work that should help strengthen service in the western part of Orange County.

Across the broader service area, the company is installing more than five miles of underground transmission cable in Clarkstown to add electric power to southern Rockland County by early 2027. In Monsey, a $4.8 million transformer upgrade is underway at the substation there. O&R says the projects are part of a systemwide effort to replace aging equipment, build automated circuits that can shrink the size and duration of outages, place some systems underground, reinforce overhead lines and expand vegetation management in key trouble spots.

Michele O’Connell, O&R’s president and chief executive, said the company serves nearly one million people across homes, businesses, hospitals and schools, and that customer demand is changing as summers get hotter. The utility says the current work is part of a longer push to make the grid cleaner, more resilient and better able to handle extreme weather, not just a one-season fix.

That message carries weight in Orange County and the rest of the Hudson Valley, where O&R says earlier upgrades have already reduced the number of customers affected by outages by about 15 percent. Since 2016, the company says it has invested more than $2 billion in grid improvements, after spending $293 million in 2025 and $180 million in 2024 on reliability and resilience work.

O&R’s climate planning points to flooding as the top future threat in its service territory. Its study warned that stronger and more frequent storms, heavier rainfall and coastal storm surge could worsen outage risks, and the company says its resilience plan will be updated every five years. The utility also has said Superstorm Sandy knocked out power to more than 80 percent of its customers, a reminder that the region’s next outage could arrive fast and spread widely if the grid is not hardened first.