PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — If you didn’t realize we’re in storm season during last Friday’s downpours, you had another chance to figure that out on Tuesday as heavy rain hit the region once again.
This is nothing new to PECO.
“Storm activity has really been increasing,” said PECO Vice President of Technical Services Steven Singh.
“We’ve seen, just over the last ten years, seven of our ten most damaging storms in our company's history.”
Last year alone, Singh said two of those storms happened.
So PECO has been thinking about ways to minimize the impact of nasty storms for awhile.
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“We’re putting a lot more automation now into our plans, into our equipment,” explained Singh, “so that we can really mitigate for that, and deploying a lot more technology.”
One major thing PECO has been doing, and will continue doing, is installing recloser devices.
“These devices,” described Singh, “what they do is they really stop the flow of electricity on the line and automatically restore electricity whenever possible. And this really minimizes the impact to our customers.”
PECO is using more than $120 million to instal 1,500 more of these over the next five years, because Singh said they’ve been effective.
“If a tree fell, typically we would have to wait to dispatch a resource out there to go fix the issue, repair the line, all this time the customer is off,” Singh said as an example.
“But with these reclosers it self isolates it, automatically within seconds so that in many cases the power to the customer is never lost.”
Singh said last year PECO saw its fourth lowest and fifth shortest year ever in its history in terms of outages.
Reclosers are just part of the PECO storm prep/outage prevention plan.
“Using stronger poles, we’re using bigger cross arms, they’re called ‘fiber glass cross arms’ that last longer,” Singh said.
“We’re really, truly hardening the system to prevent the (outage) from happening in the first place.”
But outages are still going to happen. Singh said reclosers will free up crews to respond quicker.
He also reminds PECO customers to report any outage when it happens to make sure the company is aware.