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understand how to prepare before a storm, how restoration works and how to stay safe around electricity and generators.
On the environmental side, the LCEC Environmental Funding Award program, launched in 2013, has awarded more than $ 300,000 in local grants to support environmental projects. These efforts help protect the natural resources that make Southwest Florida unique, from wildlife and waterways to conservation areas and coastal ecosystems.“ For us, community support is not separate from our business activities, it is part of the cooperative model. Our members are our owners, and our success is directly connected to the strength and resilience of the communities we serve,” Sarah emphasizes.
Reinforcing all of this is a substantial and ongoing program of infrastructure investment aimed at supporting growth, reliability, and storm readiness. Across the service territory, LCEC is delivering substation upgrades, transmission and distribution improvements, service center investments and continued system modernization. In the eastern portion of the territory, projects at the Lehigh and Lake Trafford substations are expanding capacity to support continued residential and commercial growth. These upgrades also ensure that capacity is available where and when members need it. Furthermore, the cooperative is also investing in service center facilities, including projects on Sanibel and in Cape Coral, which strengthen operational coordination, staging and storm response capability. In a stormprone region, having the right facilities in the right locations is a particularly important part of readiness and restoration planning. Transmission and distribution expansion projects are also underway or planned across 28