Euclid, OHIO — In 2021, Cuyahoga County became the first county in the country in 75 years to start their own utility company. Now they are the first in the country to start a microgrid of this size. 

A microgrid is a mini power grid that has special properties not always seen in the larger interconnected power grid.

“We have just always been a community of innovation,” said Christine McIntosh, planning and development coordinator for the city of Euclid.

The idea of Euclid joining the microgrid came from industrial businesses in the city.

“They were experiencing outages or lower, just reduced power loads, things that were affecting their production,” said McIntosh. “So, they were reaching out to the city, ‘like what can the city do to help us?’"

For the initial stages in Euclid, the microgrid infrastructure will be along East 222 street, Euclid’s industrial corridor.

The microgrid would run off green energy as much as possible.

“In our department, we care about climate change,” said Mike Foley, Director of Sustainability for the county. “Climate Change is going to affect Cuyahoga County.”

He is spearheading the microgrid project.

“We’ll be buying green electrons from wind in Texas or Iowa, things like that, so it will be clean electricity that we are buying or sourcing from the electrons that are coming from the transmission grid,” explained Foley. “We will also be generating electricity locally. We’ll have solar panels on rooftops.”

The grid can enter something called island mode. Foley said this will be especially helpful as climate change continues and storms worsen.

“If the power goes down, we’ll be about to keep power up, electricity up, for customers that are on our microgrid district. The districts will mostly be, at least starting off, manufacturing industrial customers,” said Foley.

The goal is to later hook up municipal properties to the microgrid.

“Community centers, city halls, police stations, fire stations, schools and then eventually, hopefully, to expand out to residential,” said Foley.

That’s a goal McIntosh echoes for Euclid.

“The transmission lines will probably go through the public right of way along [East] 222, Euclid Avenue, and then hopefully be able to feed into Hero Park, which we have just invested over the past couple of years,” said McIntosh.

Other projects are planned for Brooklyn and near the Cleveland Airport.