The idea of Hinsdale owning its own electric utility has come back to light.

The electrical task force recommended to village officials this month that they return to the electric utility referendum that failed in February. The referendum process involves a series of three questions that must be passed under state statute for the village to take over their own electrical system.

The task force explored a variety of options that could improve reliability in Hinsdale, but it was the meeting with the Illinois Commerce Commission staff this summer that encouraged task force to go back to the referendum. Trustee Cindy Williams, who chairs the task force, said the commission staff and legal counsel advised against filing a complaint against Commonwealth Edison because of the cost of engineering and legal work, no written standards for reliability and the difficulty in enforcing any order they may obtain.

“The referendum is probably the best way to cause change to occur and to get ComEd to take action and continue to make improvements,” said task force member Greg Spitzer.

The task force feels it was the passing of the first referendum question in April 2007 that gave them leveredge. ComEd went on to install state-of-the-art $1 million switch gear and enhanced lightning protection, replaced thousands of feet of cable and trimmed hundreds of miles of trees.

Village Manager Dave Cook said ComEd’s improvement have “without question” increased the reliability of three circuits in the village, but there are 11 more that continue to have problems.

“There’s a lot of work that’s left to be done,” Cook said. “We have a very outdated and ancient system in Hinsdale.”

Cook added that they are not yet through this year’s storms so numbers may continue to change. Recently, they have really been working with ComEd to try and isolate where some of the real problems are so they can be solved long-term instead of just getting a quick fix.

As officials return to the referendum, task force members said it’s important to educate residents and answer questions from when the last referendum was voted down.

“We really need to do the work that we didn’t do the first time,” said task force member Craig Chapello.

This includes conducting a preliminary engineering study — estimated to cost about $74,000 — to detail how the system would be laid out, where the lines would be put, how it would work and how much it would really cost.

At the same time, Williams said they will be reaching out to surrounding communities with similar reliability issues as they work with the DuPage Mayors and Managers Conference and Metropolitan Mayors Caucus to achieve power through numbers.

The task force also introduced the Galvin Electricity Initiative, which new task force member Tom Smith’s company Endurant Energy is affiliated with.

Launched in 2005, the Galvin Electricity Initiative is a campaign to create a “perfect power system” that is affordable, reliable, efficient, environmentally sound and flexible.

“Our country is in a 21st-century world and we’re living with a 19th-century power-distribution system,” Smith said. “And it’s no more evident than here in Hinsdale.”

The task force introduced Kurt Yeager, executive director of the non-profit Galvin Electricity Initiative, who discussed the “dangerously obsolete and vulnerable” power system this country runs off of and how the most important advocates for change are communities. The initiative aims to take cutting-edge technology and apply it as quickly as possible in ways that would best serve consumers, allowing them to not just use electricity but to produce it.

Working with this initiative, Hinsdale may become a “prototype community,” like Oak Park under the Illinois Smart Grid Project. The task force feels that being at the technology forefront would allow the village to isolate its system problems and potentially invest in system improvements and cost share with ComEd.