Central Virginia Electric Cooperative (CVEC) is dedicated to keeping the lights on and limiting the impact when outages do occur through strategic system improvements and an extensive Vegetation Management program.
Safe, reliable service is one of your Cooperative’s top priorities. CVEC has a reliability plan to:
- Keep the lights on by reducing faults.
- Limit the impact when faults do occur.
- Respond and repair as quickly as possible.
Strategic System Improvements to Reduce Outages & Limit Impact
Outage Causes
Most outages on the CVEC system are caused by trees growing outside of the 40-foot power line right-of-way that falls into the ROW and onto or through the power lines. After trees, outages occur due to animals/birds, lightning, equipment failure, and actions by the public (auto accidents, tree cutting, farm equipment, etc.)
Improvements Made
Vegetation Management
CVEC has an aggressive ROW maintenance program (nearly $3 million annually) to keep the lines clear. We maintain a 40-foot right-of-way for distribution lines and, depending on the voltage, a 75 to 200-foot right-of-way for transmission lines.
You will likely see ROW crews once every 5 years in your neighborhood, trimming mature trees or removing young saplings so they will not grow into the wire zone of the power lines or hinder power restoration and maintenance efforts. Read more about CVEC’s Vegetation Management program.
Danger Tree Program
On top of increasing the pace and scope of ROW work, CVEC has also adopted a “danger tree” program. Danger trees are dead, diseased, damaged, leaning or other trees that have grown to create a hazard to CVEC’s facilities. These trees are at risk of striking the Cooperative’s lines, poles and other infrastructure if they fall. Danger trees may be located outside the boundaries of CVEC’s rights-of-way and may be cut down at any time at the discretion of the Cooperative.
Inspection & Maintenance Program
In 2020, CVEC started a new Inspection and Maintenance (I&M) program to identify and make proactive repairs to its transmission and distribution system. Thanks to advancements in technology, including drones, we can acquire, view, store, and organize data more easily.
Estimated to be 65 to 75% faster than patrolling by foot, drones can obtain pictures quickly and allow our staff to view images at a later time if necessary. In addition, the elevated position of the images that are taken helps to identify problems that would not normally be seen from the ground, even with the use of magnification.
Installation of Protective Devices
CVEC has also made an effort to increase the number of protective devices located along the distribution line to isolate faults when they do occur and limit the impact of outages.
This includes:
- Putting fuses at the take-off point on all single-phase “tap lines”
- Segmenting three-phase lines with protective equipment that will isolate the fault and keep as many people in service as possible
- Looking for opportunities to construct alternate paths to back-feed power
Impact of Increased Efforts on Reliability
Keeping the lights on safely and cost-efficiently is a top priority and one of the best ways we can serve our members.
Over the past few years, CVEC slashed outage times by nearly half due to increased investments in vegetation management and substation maintenance and upgrades.
- In 2020, we achieved a record best year in reliability, with members seeing an average of 127 minutes that year!
- In 2022, an unusually active year of storms and weather-related events challenged the Cooperative’s efforts and historical reliability achievements. We saw over 1,900 outage events – the highest number we’ve seen in over a decade.
However, the chart below shows how the additional protective devices, increased inspections and line patrol, removal of danger trees, and good response times have reduced the overall impact of outage events when they do occur.
Mother nature will always play a role in outage times, but the efforts CVEC has undertaken in the past few years are having significant impacts.
Outage Response & Restoration
Despite all of the planning and best efforts, outages will occur, particularly in Cooperative territories with radial lines. A single downed tree may affect hundreds of members. After a major weather event, there may be hundreds of trees down that need to be cleared before all members will have service restored.
CVEC has worked to establish a quick response and repair process, including:
- Positioning linemen prior to a major storm with stocked vehicles and rallying volunteer linemen from other states ready to pitch in.
- Clearing primary lines first: Since the primary (three-phase) circuits feed out of the substations and provide energy to all single-phase lines located farther down the line, it is necessary to clear the primary lines first. This step permits the most members to see power restored as soon as possible.
- Close cooperation with transmission line companies: Investor-owned utilities deliver the energy to the CVEC distribution system. While fewer in frequency, when a transmission line company drops the power feed to a CVEC substation, every member is instantly out of service and will be until that company can restore service.
See the Steps to Power Restoration page for more information about our outage restoration process.
Keeping the Lights On…
Minimizing the impact and responding to outages so members enjoy the good value of comfort and convenience powered by electric energy.
