“Honey, can you bring me an extension cord for these lights?”
“Can we leave Frosty inflated all day?”
The holidays are a reminder that our modern lives rely on power. Whether it’s the impressive outdoor lighting displays or the toys and electronics that we welcome into our homes, it’s a fun, festive and electrified time of year.
To ensure the holiday spirit stays lit, PSE&G crews are in your neighborhood busy upgrading and modernizing our electric or gas systems to continue to power your modern lifestyle as reliably as ever – down to the “last mile,” your home.
Our Last Mile efforts aim to support our increasing reliance on electricity, helping meet customers’ needs by bringing improvements and upgrades into neighborhoods and directly to homes and businesses. This crucial step to upgrade our system supports new energy sources and increased energy use due to growth in our communities and growth in the use of electricity to power your modern lifestyles.
How will you benefit?
- Improves your reliability: We’re deploying new technologies to help reduce the number of outages by automatically isolating the outage, so the fewest number of customers are impacted. We’re also preparing our electric distribution system for the increased demand for electricity caused by more heatwaves, electric vehicle adoption and the new homes and businesses that are a part of New Jersey’s economic growth.
- Improves your resiliency: We’re also deploying new technologies to identify outages faster to help improve response time and reduce the duration of an outage. You’ll get your power back on faster.
How does all of this work?
Our electric distribution system delivers power from switching and substations into your neighborhoods, homes and businesses. It consists of 14,200 miles of power lines (think utility poles and even underground) – that’s roughly the equivalent of driving the entire New Jersey Turnpike 120 times.
Much of our energy infrastructure has been in place for over 50+ years, with some of it over 90 years old, and takes a lot of work just to maintain. For a system of this size and age – keeping up with regular maintenance, inspections and repairs is a full-time job. And we’re quite good at it.
We’re incredibly reliable. In fact, our service over the last three years is more reliable than the previous 20, as measured by outage minutes as experienced by customers.[i] And if power outages happen, they are for a shorter amount of time.[ii]
Looking ahead
So how do we make a great system even better? We continue to strengthen and update this decades-old system. Here are some of the Last Mile upgrades we’ve been working on in your neighborhoods:
- Upgrading electric substations and installing higher capacity circuits to safely distribute more power and strengthen our system against extreme weather.
- Replacing thousands of aging utility poles and upgrading miles of overhead wire and underground cables so they are fit for use for decades to come.
- Installation of hundreds of new smart capacitor banks that help automatically control operating voltages, underground switches, and reclosers to maintain exceptional reliability.
And, that’s not all. Behind the scenes we’re installing new technology that will allow our operators to monitor system conditions in real-time – catching potential problems before they happen.
The holidays are a time to relax, enjoy family and friends, and not worry about the reliability and resiliency of your power. That’s why we continuously strengthen and upgrade our distribution infrastructure to keep up with your needs and high expectations for exceptional service reliability – to make sure the power’s there when you need it.
[i] Reliability as measured by SAIDI; 2022-2024 SAIDI scores better than 2002-2022.
[ii] Power outage minutes as measured by CAIDI.
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