Preventative Maintenance is Key
When it comes to reliability, preventative maintenance is key. It plays a very important role in the upkeep of our power grid. A solid preventative maintenance strategy is important for any large infrastructure or system. Take, for instance, the original bay bridge. The east bound span began construction in 1949, 73 years ago. I’m willing to bet the majority of us have sat in traffic on that bridge because of up-dates and maintenance. I’m also sure that none of us praised preventative maintenance while in traffic. There was no one saying ‘I sure am happy about this preventative maintenance!’ Traffic is no fun, but it is a small price to pay considering what the bridge means to us.
Our operations team and lineworkers routinely perform preventative maintenance throughout the year. The photos that you see are from a particular job they did in the heat of July. This crew’s focus that morning was in south Dorchester County where they cleared rights-a-way, replaced 2 rotting poles, installed a switch and pulled tight some low spans of wire. All in the context of land where bucket trucks could not reach. Curtis Short, our Manager Regional Operations had this to say, “Keeping our members’ lights on is a top priority. A proactive maintenance program has proven to be the most effective approach. We constantly patrol our lines and test our equipment looking for potential problems, making repairs as needed.”
We are never happy to tell our members about a planned outage at their home. Our members do a great job of playing a very important role as member owners. Reliably paying their bills, keeping updated on our co-op and we very much appreciate the thank you notes we receive. However, our members are the very reason we make those phone calls as proactive maintenance can detect problems in advance, minimizing emergencies and improve equipment longevity. All of this reduces maintenance costs and, in turn, saves our members money and keeps them from unwanted extended outages.
Planned outages are a necessary part of bringing our members reliable and affordable electricity. We have 6,345 miles of line within our cooperative. With enough line to criss cross America two plus times, there is a lot of room for error. Poles end up rotting, equipment does have a lifespan and trees do end up falling. Our preventative maintenance program puts us ahead of the curve. We clear rights-of-way, trim trees back, replace equipment and much more in the effort of keeping our infrastructure as strong as possible and the lights on. Keeping that in mind, we are proud to say that our reliability rating is 99.98%.