The award to Dairyland Power comes from the Middle Mile Infrastructure Grant through the National Telecommunications & Information Administration. Dairyland is not an Internet provider, but will supply the infrastructure groundwork for others to bring broadband Internet to rural areas.
Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves and White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Tom Perez held a roundtable discussion with La Crosse community members to discuss how bringing fiber optic cables to rural areas would benefit their lifestyles and businesses.
"We're actually delivering (cables) so that people have not only access to high-speed Internet, but they have access to opportunities," Graves said. "What high-speed Internet does is it delivers lives of dignity."
Telemedicine, online small business and educational experiences were forefront issues for rural areas during the pandemic. Without adequate Internet connections, rural families struggled through the pandemic and afterward, Perez said.
Nate Boettcher, CEO of Pierce Pepin Cooperative Services, said his power company saw many successes with investment in broadband Internet.
"This is really our 1930s challenge of today," Boettcher said. "It's getting rural folks connected with a really essential service."
Dairyland Power expects the project's 240 miles of fiber optic cables to be completed within the next two years.
Guests also had the opportunity to see the updated systems operations center that operates Dairyland's power grid from the group's La Crosse headquarters. Reaching from northern Minnesota to the tip of Illinois, the Dairyland Power grid utilizes 3,300 miles of transmission lines responsible for providing power to parts of four states.
The new grid display system is all digital, an upgrade from an inscribed tile system that used to run the show.
"It was one-inch by one-inch tiles. Whenever we had to make a change, we had to pop all the tiles out, send them off to a company that would engrave the new symbols onto the tiles, and pop them back in," said Scott Brennan, a systems operator at Dairyland.
The upgrade will help power distributors in the area communicate with Dairyland Power to understand outages and regulate the flow of power.
©2023 the La Crosse Tribune, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
