S&C Electric opens massive Palatine manufacturing facility amid growing electric grid demand

Longtime Chicago company S&C Electric Co. held a ribbon cutting Tuesday to officially unveil its massive facility in Palatine that will meet the growing demand for its products and help increase its innovation efforts.

The 275,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at 200 Sellstrom Drive opened earlier this year, and the company has steadily moved some of its production from Rogers Park, where it's headquartered, over to the facility.

S&C Electric produces the technology that makes the electric grid smarter and more reliable. It's mission is to create an outage-free, sustainable electrical future, Joe Matamoros, S&C Electric's chief product development officer, said.

The new Palatine facility will help meet that mission, along with the growing demand for electric grid modernization technologies. The company, now employee-owned, invented the liquid power fuse — a breakthrough product that contains fire suppressant and transformed the electric utilities industry as it expanded in the early 1900s.

“We're not just moving things, but we're moving and increasing capacity,” Matamoros said. “There's a tremendous need in the United States for transmission investment for data centers, EVs and electrification. And we're seeing that need, and we're trying to meet that need.”

The expansion comes as S&C Electric outgrows its Rogers Park space at 6601 N. Ridge Blvd. The 47-acre site is landlocked in the neighborhood, which makes expansion plans and logistics challenging. Its Palatine facility is about 25 miles away and moving some operations there will free up space at its headquarters for distribution, residential and commercial products, Matamoros said.

Since so many of S&C’s products are engineered to order, it was important to have the new facility close to its Rogers Park site for employee ease of access, Matamoros said.

“We have grown a lot over the 110 years, but there's really nowhere else to grow here. I think that would have been a natural choice had we been able to do it,” Matamoros said. “We want to be in Chicago.”

The company declined to disclose costs of its Palatine facility but said it’s investing $1 million in new technology that will arrive this fall.

S&C is moving the production of some of its larger products that are more difficult logistically to transport to Palatine facility. Transmission switching products, like circuit switchers, are one of the main products being produced in Palatine, Matamoros said.

“We're pretty vertically integrated in terms of how that's built up,” he said. “It's not just assembling them, but there's a quite a bit of fabrication that happens there as well in order to build the whole thing.”

The new facility will also be home to innovation and developing new products — and it will allow for similar developments in Rogers Park.

Matamoros said S&C is unique in doing much of its innovation in the U.S., while the industry at-large takes much of that work overseas.

“The innovation that we're doing is very focused on this market,” Matamoros said. “[Palatine] allows us to really advance U.S. manufacturing and do things here, so that's why we're also excited to have the space. We have big plans for new products that need a home.”

There’s currently 135 employees at the Palatine site, according to S&C, with plans to create 200 jobs. The company is continuing to hire for positions ranging from engineering to production.

S&C has about 2,000 employees in Chicago and is prioritizing hiring locally at the new facility, Matamoros said.

“We've got a pretty big footprint here in Chicago,” he said.