A lineworker's timeline: Restoring a power outage

“How long is it going to take?” These are familiar words to all who work in the electric industry. It’s a phrase our lineworkers have been asked thousands of times. By phone, through car windows, from front porches, sidewalks, bicycles, gas pumps, and diners. It’s the first thing people think when the lights go out. It doesn’t take long sitting in the dark to realize how dependent we are on electricity. How much it makes our lives better and easier.

But what does it take to get those lights back on? Why does it sometimes take so long? Most people will never get to experience or witness the work that goes into ending outages. Hopefully, after reading this, you will better understand the process and the work that Cass County Electric Cooperative line crews are doing to restore your power.

The electricity you use travels a great distance and goes through several steps to get to your home. It starts with a power plant. Power plants use fuel to produce power. That fuel could be coal, hydro, wind, or solar. A power plant typically produces voltages of less than 30,000 volts. That voltage needs to be “stepped up” so it can travel long distances. That process starts next door in the power plant’s substation and switchyard. In the substation, a transformer will step the voltage up to 345,000 volts, or sometimes higher, and send it out on transmission lines to another substation.

At the next substation, electricity starts to get closer to its destination. Here, we start stepping the voltage down. A transformer will step the voltage down to 69,000 or 115,000 volts in this second substation and send it out to smaller local substations.

These local substations are the final substation before the electricity reaches your home. Here, it is stepped down, again with a transformer, to the 7,200 or 13,800 volts that can then be delivered to the equipment outside your home. Once it arrives outside your home, it is stepped down a final time, yes, by another transformer. This final transformer will step the voltage down to 120/240 volts that operate all the devices that power your life.

What was just described is hundreds of miles of line and thousands of poles. That’s a lot of exposure for something to happen and cause an outage. Just like your home, our system has breakers. Our breakers help us reduce the exposure of the line and allow us to split our system into sections. Doing so helps limit the size of the outages and allows us to keep as many people on as possible. Breakers also help to protect equipment on the line. Ever wonder why your lights blink a few times before going off? That’s the breaker. They operate a few times, trying to give the fault a chance to clear the line before they open for good.

Now that the lights have blinked, your breaker has opened, and the power is off. So, what happens?