Rochelle has generated its own electricity since 1896, when the city put up a power plant near what is now Spring Lake to light the downtown streets. Municipal utilities were not unusual in the 1890s, when private companies had little interest in wiring small towns and towns that wanted light had to do it themselves, and a surprising number survive: more than two thousand public power utilities still operate in the United States, thirty two of them in Illinois. What is rarer among small municipals is holding on to the generation as well as the wires. Rochelle owns and runs its electric system along with water, wastewater treatment and telecommunications, and it operates three natural gas generating stations of its own, roughly thirty megawatts in total. It is not islanded, and has not been since about 1971, when demand outgrew local generation and the city tied into the wider grid; it now both generates and buys. The generating history tracks the town's industrial history fairly precisely. A thirteen megawatt coal fired steam turbine went up in 1960 to meet growing industrial load, was retrofitted in 1993 and retired in 2004. The utility is also part of why the food processors and distribution centres came, because a municipal system can quote a rate and build a substation to suit a customer far more readily than an investor owned utility answering to a state commission. Owning the wires turns out to be a form of economic development.
Getting there
41.9216, -89.0688
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