Texas Electricity Provided by Dynowatt

The government and your local power utility do a great job of ensuring that you have power. Even so, there will always be limited interruptions in your service. Thankfully, these shortages are usually temporary; the lights (and the television!) are back on in minutes. What are the causes of these power interruptions? More importantly, what are their costs? Your local utility must correct these problems, and those fixes cost money that is passed on to you, the electricity customer.

Many power losses last for only a few seconds. (This is long enough, unfortunately, to make you have to reset your alarm clock.) According to the Florida Public Service Commission, the most common causes of brief power interruptions include lightning strikes and fallen branches. Lightning strikes represent slight overloads to systems and tree branches can cause lines to break. These problems are often corrected quickly by computer systems that are able to adjust electricity sources and destinations in fractions of a second. The FPSC also notes that power fluctuations can be the result of a utility's shift from one power source to another.

Although municipal utilities don't like spending money any more than you do, one of their responsibilities is to maintain the trees around power lines and transformers. Siegfried Guggenmoos, writing for utilityarborist.org, makes the case that doing so is a necessity, as "tree-related outages commonly comprise 20% to 50% of all unplanned distribution outages." Trimming branches and removing problematic trees is a big factor in preventing future power interruptions.

A primary regional concern with respect to the stability of electric service is one you are probably quite familiar with. Storms, because of their extreme power and unpredictable nature, are responsible for serious electrical outages. In the Southeastern United States, including Texas, residents need to worry about tornadoes and hurricanes knocking down power lines and shutting down power plants. In the Northeast, the concerns are different; ice storms and extreme snowfall are responsible for a high number of interruptions. Other kinds of inclement weather that pose a threat to power distribution are floods, forest fires, extreme cold and extreme heat. Once a storm has done its destructive work, utilities send out crews to negotiate sometimes dangerous roads to put the system back together again. When tens of thousands of people are in the dark, the companies make the tough decisions; restoring service to higher-populated areas before making their way to more sparsely populated regions. This kind of triage can be frustrating for people who live in small towns or on remote streets, but it is necessary to help the most people as fast as possible.

There are, of course, freak accidents that result in power interruptions, some of them quite serious. In May, 2010, 27,000 El Paso, Texas electricity power customers were left in the dark when a cat found its way into a transmitter. Unfortunately, the cat was killed as a result of its curiosity and El Paso, Texas electricity customers were left without power while the problem was resolved. Power lines are often hazardous to the health of wildlife. In fact, according to Sibley Guides, nearly 200 million birds are killed by high tension wires each year. Fortunately for us humans, very few of those contacts result in a power interruption. (To put that number in context, almost 1 billion birds are killed by windows each year; birds have not yet evolved to be able to see transparent glass yet.)

Nothing in life is free; it costs a great deal to restore electric service. The Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS) conducted a study and found that the "national costs of power interruptions is about $80 billion" each year. The study revealed some counterintuitive facts. Of that $80 billion, only 2%, or $1.5 million are costs related to assisting residential power consumers. The industry spends almost $57 million restoring power to commercial customers. Additionally, CERTS discovered that most of these costs result from brief interruptions lasting under five minutes. Perhaps the reason for this is the increased frequency with which these "minor" power shortages occur.

So the next time you are watching the game while microwaving some leftovers and checking your e-mail, only to have all of your appliances shut down without warning, take heart. Your power will likely be restored quite quickly and efficiently. Even better, your local utility recognizes the most frequent causes of electricity interruptions, and is being proactive to prevent as many of these as they can.