On average in 2023, Tipmont electric service was active 99.97% of the time.
It’s a .01% drop from 2022, but our performance ranks above the median for cooperatives statewide and nationwide, as well as those with a similar footprint and growth rate.
Tipmont takes pride in providing excellent service, but the value of our annual reliability report is understanding outage causes and patterns and developing data-driven solutions.
The usual suspects shuffled into last year’s lineup. Trees and wildlife, equipment failure, and weather were 2023’s top three electrical outage causes — albeit to different degrees than in 2022. Equipment failure saw a slight uptick, accounting for 24% of all outages. Meanwhile, in a mild year, weather-related outages dropped 50%.
Tipmont’s efforts to curtail curious animals are paying off. At 32%, wildlife remains the most prevalent outage cause, but the number of wildlife-related outages dropped 20% from 2022.
Conversely, tree-related outages nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023, and those outages take the longest to resolve. (Many thanks to Tipmont linemen and their support crews for always serving you as safely and swiftly as possible.)
And although low in number, transmission line outages affect the most Tipmont members because without transmission to our substations, we have no electricity to distribute to your home. As a distribution co-op, Tipmont does not own or operate transmission lines and cannot work on them. That means these outages also take longer to resolve.
As such, Tipmont’s 2023 numbers came in higher than we would like to see for both the average time members spent without power and the time required to restore service in an outage.
But Tipmont also pursued real-time recognition and remedy. Upon observing an increase in transmission line outages in early 2023, Tipmont engineers took strategic recommendations to our transmission partners. As a result, transmission line outages fell significantly from the first half of 2023 to the second half. This is largely due to improved trimming/right-of-way maintenance to help keep trees from transmission lines.
Meanwhile, Tipmont is continuing infrastructure improvements in 2024. We are moving more lines underground to limit exposure to high winds, heavy trees, and storm debris. And our advanced metering infrastructure project will help us more quickly and accurately pinpoint outages as they happen.
It’s how Tipmont looks well beyond the next few years — and into the next decade-plus — to maintain reliability and empower you with our essential service of electricity.
