Suggested Practices for Reducing Animal-Caused Outages

Power quality is a major issue for electric utilities today. Sensitive electronic equipment and computers are a part of daily life, and consumers are increasingly critical of service interruptions. In many cases, outages and nuisance recloser operations are the result of animal contacts somewhere on the system. Although animal-caused outages have been a fact of life for electric utilities since the first line was constructed, there is very little general information available on what methods and products can effectively reduce such outages. In an effort to provide electric utilities with a source of practical information, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) and Southern Engineering have prepared a field manual on suggested practices and polices that can be used to reduce animal-caused outages on transmission lines, in substations, on overhead distribution lines, and in underground distribution systems. This article contains a summary of selected topics as they appear in the manual for the animals responsible for the majority of outages Some utilities evaluate their animal-caused outages as a percent of their total system outages from all causes. This method, however, will often understate the seriousness of the problem since animal contacts tend to occur at specific locations. Many utilities reported areas on their system where 80-90% of all outages were caused by animals.