Ohio Cooperative Living - August - Washington

MESSAGE FROM THE GENERAL MANAGER

Why does my power go out?

Despite Washington Electric’s best efforts, from to time, the power goes out. Even though we cannot guarantee our members 100% reliability all the time, we take great steps to find ways we can improve our track record of keeping your lights on. And while we know every power outage can be a great inconvenience, when you look at our record of how much time the power is on, it is very impressive. Year-todate for 2021, our members have had the power on for 99.85% of the time, on average.

So, exactly why does the power go out at times, and what is Washington Electric doing to improve reliability? The graph below shows causes and durations of power outages that have occurred thus far in 2021. As you can see, trees are the largest contributor with 62% of the time our members have been without power being due to trees coming in contact with our lines (usually trees located outside of our rightsof-way falling into the lines). Washington Electric and the contractors we hire work very hard to keep our rights-ofway clear to reduce tree-related outages. In 2021, we have budgeted $1,850,000 for these efforts, which is a significant portion of our total annual operating budget. We also

evaluate relocating lines that are scheduled to be rebuilt due to age closer to roads with fewer trees to cause issues. When cost-justified, we will even replace overhead lines in heavily wooded areas with underground lines. Due to our natural surroundings in southeast Ohio, I believe trees will always be our biggest cause of outages, but we hope to see the numbers of outages and outage times reduced as we continue these efforts.

The next greatest contributor of outages are ones that are actually experienced on the American Electric Power (AEP) lines feeding our substations. While these transmission-related outages lead to a lot of member outage time due to a significant number of members being fed from one substation, the frequency of these outages is small. For example, there have only been five transmission-related power outages thus far in 2021, but these have caused 15%

of the total outage time experienced by our members. We have been working to replace older substations with aged transmission feeds with newer substations that are fed from new and much more reliable highvoltage transmission lines. We have already seen a great improvement from these efforts and expect to continue seeing improvement in this area with each new transmission line and substation constructed.

The chart on the previous page shows that 7% of our outages are due to “defective equipment.” These are outages created when equipment such as a breaker or transformer malfunctions or fails. Maintenance programs in place work to proactively identify failing equipment and replace aging equipment before it causes an outage. Scheduled outages account for 5% of outage times. These occur when we need to turn the power off to safely work on the system — usually to replace poles or other equipment that has been identified as a concern.

About 4% of our outages are caused by unknown reasons, meaning that the linemen who respond are

not able to find a definitive cause for the outage. Often these are caused by an animal, tree limb, or lightning that is no longer on the line when the linemen get there. Small animals such as squirrels and birds cause 3% of total outages. We have programs in place to cover up more of the energized components on poles to minimize the ability of animals to get across something that is energized and grounded and cause these outages. The largest of these programs involve covering up bushings and jumpers on transformers. A little over half of all transformers have been addressed to date. Rounding out the list of outage causes is the “all other” category, which includes things such as car accidents that involve our poles, machinery that knocks down lines, lightning, etc.

Everyone here at Washington Electric is working hard to move that 99.85% figure closer to 100%. We know we can never actually achieve 100%, but rest assured that when the power does go out, our employees will get you back on as quickly as they can safely do so, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.