Electricity Today T&D Magazine

Every day across North America, animals enter electrical substations in search of warmth, food, shelter, or simply out of curiosity. What often begins as routine wildlife behaviour can escalate quickly into serious grid reliability issues. In many service territories, wildlife intrusion is now the leading cause of unplanned outages, surpassing storms, vegetation contact, and equipment failure. According to data cited by the American Public Power Association, animal-related incidents account for more outages than any other single cause.

The financial impact of a single substation outage is substantial. Even a brief interruption can result in tens of thousands of dollars in direct costs, including damaged equipment, emergency crew deployment, and lost labor hours. When high-voltage components are involved, replacement timelines and repair complexity can extend outages further, compounding costs. Across the industry, annual utility spending to recover from animal-related incidents is estimated in the billions of dollars. These figures do...