It was one week ago when straight line winds knocked out power to thousands of people in Indiana County. Now that power has been restored to everyone, Penelec is talking about how it can mitigate widespread outages.
Work has been going on with First Energy, Penelec’s parent company, to strengthen and enhance its smart grid as part of a long term infrastructure improvement plan. It entails an additional $1.42 billion in investments from last year to 2029. The projects are designed to shorten the duration of outages and to decrease their occurrence. This includes replacing utility poles and wires, selectively putting lines underground in areas that are frequently hit, and items to switch people to other substations to get power back as soon as possible.
Penelec’s Todd Meyers said that another of that is looking at trees outside of their right of way as many outages are due to trees or limbs falling on lines utility poles.
A total of $538 million is expected to be spent in Penelec’s coverage area, while West Penn Power’s area will receive $368 million.
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