President’s Day of 2003 seems a distant memory for many Buckeye Rural Electric Cooperative members, but it is still recalled as a nightmare by co-op employees and those whose power was off for weeks due to the ice storm.

Three years later, a massive Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster recovery project, combined with an aggressive capital work plan, has resulted in the erection of new lines and poles and construction of new substations across the BREC system.

The work of replacing 60-year-old wires and poles goes on. In fact, the FEMA project, funded by 75-percent federal reimbursement, will continue through 2006. Already, reduction in the number of power outages and the length of outage time per consumer across the system are reasons to celebrate, according to BREC Vice President of Engineering and Planning Jeff Tackett.

Tackett said the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) requires electric cooperative borrowers to track power outages on their systems by month and submit an annual statistical report. Records are kept on number and type of power outages, total consumer outage hours, average number of consumers affected, and outage hours per total consumer base.

The critical statistic is outage hours per consumer (OHC). It is an indicator of system reliability and a symptom of problems (old equipment in need of replacement, overgrown rights-of-way, inadequate maintenance, outage response time improvement needed).

“Lots of factors impact outage hours per consumer,” Tackett said. “Power supply outages due to failures on the transmission side and storms resulted in our longest and most widespread outages in 2005, but the good news is that we still had the lowest OHC total in the history of the co-op!”

He said RUS wants five hours or less of outage time per consumer, a goal BREC has never achieved in its long history.

In December, Tackett projected 4.9 annual outage hours per consumer. This doesn’t mean each of BREC’s consumers experienced 4.9 hours of outage time or even had a power outage. Rather, the total number of consumer hours (84,543) that the system logged without power to meters was spread across the 18,000-plus co-op member base.

Subtracting power supply outages from the total reduces the annual OHC to 4.1, according to Tackett.

“For the first time, we are below the level that RUS wants to see. This is very good news,” he said.

“The FEMA project is allowing us to repair damage and replace many miles of antiquated Copperweld wire. In addition, our Operations group has a very effective maintenance program underway. We are replacing lots of defective hot line clamps and using our infrared camera to detect hot spots before equipment fails,” noted Tackett.

“The vegetation management program is keeping utility rights-of-way cleared, and we’ve built new substations and tie lines across the system.”

The cumulative effect of this work and system investment is greater service reliability.

“The real test will be during the next extreme storm, but I believe we are making progress. Our members have been telling us that they are experiencing fewer power outages. The statistics for 2005 bear this out. We need to keep striving for improvement,” Tackett added.

2005 Annual Outage Report
(Actual through November; December projected)
Total Outages of All Types = 634
Total Number of Consumers Affected = 41,784
Total Consumer Hours of Outage Time = 84,543
Average Number of Consumers Affected = 65.9
Outage Hours per Consumer = 4.9