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How PECO Prepares for Outages

PECO has been supplying power to its customers for over 100 years.  PECO continually invests in the equipment serving customers, building a smarter, more resilient electric grid. This means safer, more reliable power. Visit Smart Grid & Smart Meters and Reliability Improvements for details.   
  
Here are some of the things that we do behind the scenes, to supply power to our customers with as few interruptions as possible. 

Preventive maintenance 

We are always looking for ways to prepare for the next big storm.  You can see us in your neighborhood trimming the tree branches that could bring down a power line. What you may not see is our constant vigilance to proactively inspect and weatherize equipment, making the necessary upgrades as they are needed.  We have members of our staff inside the control room and out on the streets who are trained to spot trouble before it becomes a problem for our customers.

Extensive ongoing training 

As you would expect, each member of our staff is trained to handle the specific tasks that they are engaged in every day.  What most people don't know is that many members of our staff receive an extra level of training that kicks in during a storm or power outage. This extra training is used for those members of the staff who are in an on-call rotation, year-round. "Storm duty" includes an entirely new set of responsibilities focusing on preparing our resources for incoming weather and the safe restoration of power.  During the year we even have "Storm Drills" to keep our staff fully prepared, day or night. 

Weather based staffing

The repair crews who work at PECO know that stormy weather brings different staffing needs. Our leaders monitor changing weather conditions by following the combination of forecasted temperatures, wind speeds, rain, snow, etc. These combinations of conditions become a weather category and each category has an operational plan that helps us determine staffing levels for the upcoming days.  We also have off-duty crews who can be called in as needed.  PECO staffs 24/7 to be prepared for the worst so you can get your power restored as quickly as possible.  

Mutual assistance programs 

The PECO territory is adjacent to four other Exelon power company territories.  Do we know the leaders who manage those other territories on a first name basis and have them on speed dial?  We sure do.  When we need extra crews, they are there to help and when they need our help, we do the same.  But that is a small fraction of what is known in the industry as Mutual Assistance.  We have access to considerable resources, both regional and national, we even have access to repair crews from Canada, to get extra help when needed.  During big storms, these programs expand into enormous logistical projects.  But even in smaller storms, you can be sure that we are working as hard as we can, with our local repair crews, to restore your power as quickly as possible.   
  

 


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