Local

Issues At Utility Substations Behind South-Metro’s Mass Power Outages

February 14th, 2014

Storm damage to major utility lines at some Georgia Power substations caused hundreds of thousands of south metro-Atlanta residents to lose power during this week’s snow and ice storm, according to Georgia Power.As heard on the radio

Georgia Power spokesman John Craft said as of Friday afternoon power had been restored 99 percent of metro-Atlanta residents. That includes the vast majority of those living south of Interstate-20, which saw the heaviest damage from the 2-day storm.

Craft said the utility tallied more than 290,000 outages in Georgia Power’s south-metro region, which includes south Fulton, Clayton, Coweta, Fayette, Henry and Butts counties. He said the majority of those outages were due to downed trees that damaged “feeder lines” at 21 of the area’s 34 utility substations.

The way power distribution normally works: Energy starts at one of Georgia Power’s 18 generating plants.

The energy moves from one of those plants through high-voltage power lines, called transmission lines, to substations. There, energy is converted to a lower voltage.

That lower-level energy then moves from the substation through feeder lines that serve between 500 and 2,000 people. Those feeder lines filter energy to ever smaller power lines, and eventually to homes and businesses. When those feeder lines are knocked down, that triggers a reaction at the substation.

“When the system detects that fault, that error that something is going wrong, the circuit breaker in the substation will operate to stop that flow of electricity before it can do further damage,” Craft said.

South-metro’s estimated 290,000 outages account for more than 40 percent of the more than 700,000 total outages statewide.

Craft said issues with feeder lines were a problem all across the state, but “because there was so much more ice forming, so many more trees falling in this line from sort of south metro-Atlanta to Augusta, those are the areas that experienced the most outages or the heaviest damage.”

Craft said as of Friday afternoon, less than 500 people in the area were still without power in the utility’s south-metro region.