During the spring, EPE prepares for the very hot summer months common in our area.  We use this time to do maintenance on our generation equipment as well as to upgrade our transmission and distribution lines and equipment. We stock up on equipment that is commonly affected during the summer months. EPE also makes arrangements to have crews available to make sure these types of outages are resolved as quickly as possible.

Increased demand

During hot weather months, EPE customers naturally increase their use of air conditioners which run for longer periods as the heat continues into the late afternoon and evening hours. In recent years, more EPE customers have also switched to refrigerated-air units which use more energy compared to the evaporative cooling units that they have replaced. 

Overloaded Equipment

The additional demand for power may overload electric lines, transformers and other equipment used to deliver electricity. Sustained electric demand during hot weather may not allow transformers time to cool properly overnight, causing them to overheat and damage the electrical equipment. Outages related to overloaded transformers don’t affect the majority of EPE’s customers. Once EPE identifies the problem, EPE’s crews replace the damaged equipment with equipment that can handle bigger loads.

Thunderstorms

Thunderstorms are the number one cause of customer outages on EPE’s electric system. More accurately, it is the lightning and wind bursts that accompany a thunderstorm that usually cause the outages. The energy of a lightning strike is difficult to overcome, but EPE has deployed lightning arrestors and extensive grounding on system equipment to help prevent these outages as much as possible. EPE also has an aggressive tree trimming and line clearing program to help reduce tree/wind-caused outages. EPE continually monitors the weather for approaching thunderstorms and calls additional crews into service, in advance, to help respond quickly to outages when the storm hits our system.