Electricity Today T&D Magazine

Every day across the country, animals enter substations for warmth, food, security, or simply out of curiosity. In many areas, wildlife intruding into power equipment has become the leading cause of outages – even more common than storms or vegetation.

A single substation outage can cost tens of thousands of dollars in equipment repair or replacement, man-hours and more. The annual cost to utility companies of recovering from animal-related outages is estimated in the billions of dollars, excluding the costs of lost commercial activity, reduced productivity, and consumer dissatisfaction.
So, what’s the solution for deterring an animal’s natural instinct to enter a substation? 

PATENTED FENCE KEEPS CLIMBING ANIMALS OUT

In 2015, Former National Security Agency Deputy Director John C. Inglis said that squirrels were the number-one threat to the U.S. electrical grid, even more than terrorism or cyberattacks. With increasing annual power needs and shrinking animal habitats, that threat...