How CU keeps Southwest Missouri prepared for growth
The best infrastructure is the kind nobody thinks about. The lights come on. The water flows. The plant hums through another shift without a second thought given to the power moving it. That ease is easy to take for granted, which is exactly the point. It’s the product of decades of planning and resources managed to stay ahead of demand, and it’s the quiet foundation everything in a growing region is built on.
In Southwest Missouri, that foundation is City Utilities of Springfield. Consider Fellows Lake, one of the region’s water sources, holding 10 billion gallons. On a normal day, the region draws only a fraction of it. That gap between what’s stored and what’s needed isn’t luck. It’s a choice, made and remade over decades, to keep far more on hand than any single day demands. City Utilities runs on that logic across every system it operates: more generating capacity than today’s peak, a second way to move water when the first goes down, backup power waiting in batteries and turbines. The reason no one has to think about it is that someone already did.
Capacity that’s already in place
The scale is easiest to see one system at a time, across a 320-square-mile service area.
Electricity is the largest. City Utilities can call on roughly 1,260 megawatts of generating capacity, 862 megawatts it owns and 400 more under long-term purchase agreements, with membership in the SPP, the regional grid operator, adding another layer of supply behind it.
Natural gas moves through the system on 2.38 billion cubic feet of firm storage and firm pipeline delivery of 125,000 dekatherms per day.
Connectivity keeps pace. SpringNet, CU’s fiber network, runs more than 1,860 miles of fiber on a 100 Gbps backbone.
None of this is capacity spun up on short notice. It’s already in place, already running, with room to spare for whatever comes next.
Water security not every region can claim
Water rarely gets a thought until there isn’t enough of it, and it’s where Southwest Missouri quietly stands apart. City Utilities draws from seven sources delivering more than 50 million gallons per day, with Fellows Lake alone holding 10 billion gallons in reserve. Two treatment plants, Blackman at 52.5 million gallons per day and Fulbright at 20.5 million gallons per day, keep that supply moving.
That kind of dependable, affordable water fades into the background here, but it flows through everything the region makes, food and beverage manufacturing most of all, where water carries production, sanitation, cooling, and quality control. Across much of the country, that supply is getting harder to count on as water grows scarcer and more expensive. Not every region can say it has real water security. We can.
Reliability built in layers
Disruptions can’t be predicted, but you can be prepared for when they do. City Utilities builds that preparation in layers. On the water side, the newly completed 11-mile, 48-inch transmission main connecting Fellows Lake to the Blackman treatment plant gives CU’s largest treatment facility a backup it didn’t have before. On the power side, local generation works alongside SPP access and 36 megawatts of battery energy storage, using zinc-based systems that are non-flammable, fully recyclable, and domestically sourced.
The payoff is depth, not just breadth. Multiple sources, layered generation, and built-in backups mean a problem in one place stays in one place, rarely becoming an outage anyone downstream notices.
Planned decades ahead
City Utilities plans on a horizon measured in decades.
The new water transmission main took nearly 20 years of planning and coordination, patience that let CU manage costs for ratepayers and capture grant funding along the way. The same discipline is at work now: three new dual-fuel natural gas turbines, 50 megawatts each with a five-minute quick start, are set to come online in 2028, built in direct response increased regulatory requirements and the need for additional power supply.
“By the time a project goes into service, we’ve already spent five to 10 years anticipating future demand,” said Ben Jones, director of economic development at City Utilities. “When a major manufacturer calls, they’re not asking whether we can build capacity. They’re asking whether it’s already there, already reliable, and already resilient.”
That’s the quiet difference between a community hoping it can support growth and one that saw growth coming.
Built through partnership
Infrastructure is only as strong as the people who plan it. In Southwest Missouri, City Utilities, the Ozarks Regional Economic Partnership, the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, and the local governments of Springfield and Greene County work as partners, not separate lanes. That coordination shows up long before any single need does, with the utility at the table early rather than brought in late.
That partnership has also built things. The Partnership Industrial Center and its newer expansion, PIC-West, two of the region’s purpose-built industrial sites, came out of exactly this kind of joint planning. “We come to the table with shared playbooks and a real understanding of each other’s roles,” Jones said. “The pieces are already in place, so the region can move as one.”
None of this draws attention to itself, and it isn’t meant to. A water main laid for the next generation. Power capacity waiting on demand that hasn’t arrived yet. The work that matters most is the work no one has to notice. Southwest Missouri built it that way on purpose, not by waiting for growth and scrambling to catch up, but by preparing for it years in advance, so the region is ready to hold whatever comes next.
