Dive Brief:
- Pennsylvania utilities PPL and FirstEnergy/Met-Ed are spending millions to improve reliability and help prevent outages as extensive as those that occurred in 2012 after Superstorm Sandy struck the East Coast.
- PPL is in the midst of a five-year, $3.8 billion series of projects while Met-Ed is spending $110 million this year to boost reliability.
- Smart grid investments are key to allowing utilities to quickly pinpoint the site of a downed tree limb or snapped power line.
Dive Insight:
The amount of system hardening a utility can perform to ameliorate the effects of weather-induced outages depends largely on how much regulators allow the utility to charge ratepayers for the work.