Understanding Power Outages and Reliability

Why did the lights go out? While we make every effort to provide a reliable supply of electricity to our customers, power outages do happen. There are many different causes of power outages.

This chart shows the power outages in 2018 by outage cause. This does not include scheduled power outages for system maintenance or upgrades.

As you can see, the two largest contributing factors to power outages are Adverse Weather and Defective Equipment. In 2018, seven power outages were the result of motor vehicle accidents.

What can we do about power outages? Some of the outages caused by Defective Equipment may be reduced through a more aggressive replacement program. This comes with an increased cost.

With some equipment, such as power transformers, we choose a run to failure approach rather than proactive replacement since the cost of a proactive replacement program on those items would be very high.

Other items, such as poles and porcelain insulators, we proactively replace as they age. The pace at which we replace these items can affect reliability and cost. The faster we replace these items, the greater the cost but the potential for improved reliability also increases.

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