Few things in life are as reliable as your electric service. On average, customers of PPL Electric Utilities have service more than 99.9 percent of the time.

Still, despite our extensive maintenance programs, advanced equipment and experienced operations personnel, power outages do occur. These outages may be caused by severe weather, tree limbs that fall on power lines, animals that short out equipment, vehicle accidents and equipment problems.

We’re stepping up our efforts to combat these threats and keep the lights on.

Weathering the storm

Trees and tree limbs are a leading cause of outages. Buffeted by high winds, pounded by heavy snow and ice, and weakened by age and insects, trees have a way of finding power lines in severe storms.

To lessen the likelihood of problems, we trim more than 5,500 miles of power lines each year. That’s enough to stretch from New York to Los Angeles and back.

Keeping animals out

Power lines are like highways in the sky for squirrels and raccoons. To keep these tightrope artists from shorting and damaging electrical devices like transformers, we install animal guards on all new equipment and on existing equipment where animals have caused problems.

Inspecting equipment

Each year we conduct a thorough review of one-quarter of our distribution system. As part of that effort, we put more than 3,500 miles of power lines under the microscope.

Using special infrared cameras mounted on vehicles, we search for hot spots on electrical equipment. These hot spots, invisible to the naked eye, glow like bright spots on the camera’s images and provide early warning of potential trouble spots.

The images enable us to find and repair problems before they lead to power outages.

Improving the system

Over the next five years, we’ll spend more than $1.4 billion to maintain, expand and improve our electric delivery system.

Our efforts include installing more switches and protective devices on our power lines so that we can divide our system into smaller sections, quickly isolate problems and limit the number of customers affected by outages.

This includes adding new automated switches and switches that can be operated remotely without having to send a crew into the field.

Enabling a quicker response

We continue to invest in new software and technology to speed the company’s response to power outages. And we’ve adopted extended daylight shifts for linemen to respond more quickly to late afternoon and evening power outages that may occur.