Smart Energy Plan

September 03, 2026

Smart switches restore entire community in one second

Rapid response highlights customer benefits of local grid upgrades

It was a sunny August morning in Lincoln County when power lines supplying the entire town of Moscow Mills suddenly lost power. But what could have been an outage impacting more than 2,300 customers likely went unnoticed by most. That's because smart switches installed by Ameren Missouri reacted to the outage nearly instantly, restoring power to all 2,300 customers in just one second.

In the span of that one second, smart switches identified the loss of power, isolated the impacted section and opened a new pathway for power to flow to homes and businesses.

"We understand no outage is convenient for our customers, which is why we are upgrading our infrastructure to respond faster when problems occur," said Ken Worland, director of Ameren Missouri's Northeast Missouri division. "In this case, the system itself restored customers so quickly that most may not even realize a problem occurred."

Ameren Missouri began installing these devices through its Smart Energy Plan in 2019. Smart switches monitor the grid and can react automatically to isolate issues and help reduce outage impacts. Since 2021, these devices have restored more than half a million customer outages after major storms.

The company is working to bring these restoration benefits to more customers in Lincoln County. In fall of 2026, crews will install four additional devices on overhead power lines to expand the area's smart grid capabilities. Crews will also upgrade the Moscow Mills substation with smart technology, providing additional reliability benefits to the community.

To learn more about Smart Energy Plan upgrades in your area, visit Ameren.com/Reliability.