Distribution Upgrades
Making Energy More Reliable and Strengthening the Grid
Our customers depend on us for reliable electric service to manage their daily lives, feel safe and comfortable in their homes and businesses, and protect them during times of emergency. They expect uninterrupted service and, when an outage does occur, fast service restoration with regular communication. To meet these expectations and continue to serve our customers, we make prudent investments in our infrastructure.
How We Measure Reliability
These investments have resulted in improved reliability for our customers as measured by industry performance metrics (System Average Interruption Duration Index or SAIDI and System Average Interruption Frequency Index or SAIFI).
Improved Inspection Methods
Since 2008, over 614,000 poles and devices were subjected to a patrol inspection. In the past five years, because of these inspections, over 6,400 poles and devices have been replaced. In addition to the inspections, Liberty also monitors reliability information on a monthly basis to determine if there are trends in reliability statistics that indicate a need for further investigation.
Investments
- In 2020, we replaced or reinforced more than 1,500 poles and sectionalized 20 circuits. Replacing aging and deteriorating poles protects the safety and wellbeing of our customers. Sectionalization helps reduce the number of customers impacted when an outage occurs and leads to faster restoration time.
- We’ve installed wildlife guards on 3,000 devices to protect against animal-related outages, our second leading cause of outages. These guards not only safeguard our equipment, but they also protect wildlife.
Crews replace aged distribution powerline
Aged pole is inspected and then treated by a Liberty contractor
New sectionalization switching devices are shown on structure