MARQUETTE — Marquette residents are one step closer to more reliable power.

The Marquette City Commission recently approved a 30% rate hike for Board of Light and Power customers. That rate hike will help pay for the new Energy Center. Tuesday night, the Board of Light and Power held a meeting to discuss the next steps in getting the center installed.

“We’re going to do a release to engineering so they can begin to start putting the engineering and assembly line and get all the details out of Helsinki to Trieste, Italy for putting one, two, three in through their plant,” said Paul Kitti, Executive Director of the BLP, “We’re going to be doing slight site clearing and slight site preparation probably this fall, over here. We’ve identified a location that we’re going to clear out and move some of our transformers that are out in the pole yard and actually, our pole yard, where we keep a lot of our poles, we’re going to move those to another location because the engine house is going to be located right next to our substation.”

The Board of Light and Power will wire over $2 million tonight as a down payment for the Warstila Units. The process of building them should take around six months.