Butler County electric utilities manage maintenance, storm repairs
No matter the season, storms, high winds, heavy precipitation and fallen trees bring with them outages and electrical problems for homes across Butler County.
As winter transitions into spring and snowstorms turn into rain, electric utilities continue to examine the weak points of the grid in Butler County, strategize to deal with downed trees and other problems, and work to communicate with the public.
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission analyzes reliability of electrical service across the state every year, said Nils Hagen-Frederiksen, of the PUC. The report is published in mid-summer.
The most recent report, evaluating utilities’ performance over 2020, noted that Butler County utility West Penn Power had nine reportable outages in 2020, with its largest outage on Nov. 15, 2020, affecting 60,268 customers. Penn Power had only two outages in 2020, on June 10 and Nov. 15, affecting just over 10,000 customers in both cases.
In 2019, West Penn had eight outages, with one in February affecting 177,232 customers, the largest individual total number of customers impacted of any other Pennsylvania utility that year. The reasons given for outages in 2020 for both Penn and West Penn included severe thunderstorms, storms, strong winds, lightning and heavy rains.
The report cited equipment failure, including line failure, and off-right-of-way trees as top causes of outages, customers affected and customer-minutes interrupted. Trees off right of way are those planted on private property that may fall onto power lines in a storm due to their height.
About 56% of West Penn Power customer interrupted minutes were caused by trees, the report read, and 28% were caused by equipment failures. Trees and animal outage causes contributed to more than 63% of total lost customer-minutes for Penn Power.
Hagen-Frederiksen said that storms have gotten both more common and more severe in recent years, which can cause more disruptions to electrical services across the state.
“We continue to see an increased tempo in the number and severity of storms all year long, and the number and severity of storms has an impact on the number of service disruptions,” he said. “Responding to it, from a physical point of view, what can you do to harden systems that might be vulnerable to severe weather? They also look at it from a technology point of view, in terms of smarter systems that can detect outages earlier and reroute power more quickly and restore service more quickly. The smarter the grid is, the more it is able to respond, and the more it is able to pinpoint faults so that crews can roll earlier and get to the source of the problem.”
Central Electric Cooperative, which serves portions of Butler County, is not under the jurisdiction of the PUC due to being a co-op utility. According to its 2020 annual report, the utility also faced issues related to trees, with trees causing more than 63% of outages. Additionally, power supply outages contributed to 20% of outage time, and two major storm events contributed to 53% of outages.
Renee Tritten, communications supervisor at Central Electric, said trees are one of the “most common” causes of outage problems, but not all outages are caused by falling trees.
“We have wildlife up there too — squirrels, birds, especially in the spring, when they try to put their nests, in, it just doesn’t go well,” she said. “Animals really hurt our (poles) — birds, specifically, woodpeckers, or bears scratching at them. A couple years ago we saw one (pole) in the back country of Moraine that a bear had completely shredded, because it had used it as a scratching post.”
Across Central Electric’s service area, emergency maintenance is supported by “proactive system maintenance” throughout the year, Tritten said.
“A lot of our system is inspected on a rotating basis, with all of the different pieces of equipment having a different cycled term,” she explained. “For example, we inspect poles every year, and we inspect about 6,000 poles in a given year, and when we leave that pole and come back to that pole, it’s usually about six years later. That’s about how we keep up on all of our systems — all the different categories of equipment have their own length.”
Moving forward, Tritten said, Central Electric is keeping an eye on expanding growth in Butler County and keeping pace with influxes of residents and their power usage.
“We’re seeing a lot of different growth in members, and how much demand they’re putting on the system, how much energy they’re using,” she said. “We actually have several line rebuild projects, system improvement projects, (and) we are doing them to help put in equipment that is more capable of handling the demand that the members are putting on the system. That’s better reliability and better experience for the end user.”
West Penn Power and Penn Power, both First Energy Corp. companies, service a large portion of Butler County. Todd Meyers, senior communications rep at West Penn Power, explained that West Penn has a number of upgrades and maintenance projects in the works. As fallen trees cause a large number of outages, tree trimming is a priority.
“Tree trimming is one of West Penn Power’s most critical tools when it comes to keeping the lights on or restoring power in the wake of severe weather,” he said. “West Penn Power, in 2021, proactively removed more than 125,000 trees that could have damaged or interfered with our electric distribution lines, including deteriorated ash trees harmed or killed by the emerald ash borer.”
The company’s tree program in 2022 includes about $2 million to remove about 10,000 dead and dying ash trees along distribution lines in Western Pennsylvania, according to Meyers. Crews have removed about 1,600 ash trees so far this year, he said.
“Maintaining proper clearances around electrical equipment can reduce the frequency and duration of tree-related power outages, especially those associated with severe weather such as spring and summer thunderstorms that are just around the corner.” Meyers wrote. “When we do have storm-related power outages, clear right-of-ways beneath the lines allow our crews to have easier access to bring in trucks and other equipment to make repairs. That helps shorten the duration of power outages.”
The company’s ongoing long-term infrastructure improvement plans include reliability and resiliency improvement projects, including an upcoming maintenance on a Butler power line near Center Avenue.
“We will convert a section of 4-kilovolt wire to West Penn Power’s standard voltage of 12-kilovolts,” Meyers explained. “This should improve the reliability of electric service for about 140 customers and help avoid voltage issues.”
The company also plans to inspect a stretch of power lines crossing 13 miles in the Portersville and Slippery Rock area, and place about 300 new fuses on 16 power lines around the City of Butler and south on the Route 8 corridor headed toward Pittsburgh.
July also will see maintenance work on a region of aging underground power lines near Butler County Community College in Dutchtown Village.
“West Penn Power has hired an electrical contractor that specializes in restoring buried cable without excavation,” Meyers said. “The contractors will inject the power line with a silicone-based fluid that should prolong its useful life by 20 or 30 years. This method fills in cracks and spaces in the worn insulation encasing the wire and allows the line to support continued reliable electric service for a fraction of what it would have cost to replace it and eliminates the need to dig trenches through landscaped yards and driveways for cable replacement.”
