​MAYS LANDING, N.J. (Sept. 18, 2019) – With hurricane season upon us, Atlantic City Electric has been hard at work upgrading and enhancing the local energy grid to better serve its customers.

As part of this effort, Atlantic City Electric has completed work to upgrade a priority list of distribution lines that serve thousands of customers. Through data-driven analysis, the company's engineers identified and prioritized lines within its service area that have experienced the most interruptions during the past two years.

"We are always working to improve service for our customers," said Doug Mokoid, Atlantic City Electric director of Regional Electric Operations. "Through careful analysis of our data, we identify parts of our energy system where we are not meeting our expectations and we use that data to plan upgrades that will modernize the energy grid and improve service for customers. With the more extreme weather we continue to see each season, this targeted work continues to be critical to making sure we can power our customers when storms hit."

This year, crews upgraded 26 distribution lines within 50 different municipalities in Atlantic, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Ocean and Salem counties to benefit residents in these areas. Distribution lines are power lines you would typically see running through a neighborhood delivering power directly to local homes and businesses.

Crews installed new utility poles and associated energy infrastructure, animal protection, and devices including switches, reclosers, and fuses, to help minimize the number of affected customers if an outage does occur. Crews also installed innovative technologies to improve system reliability, such as specialized equipment that can automatically restore service more quickly or isolate damage.

Other reliability enhancement work the company performs year-round includes trimming trees that could potentially impact the system, installing steel utility poles capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds, building new substations and installing new equipment at existing substations, building new underground equipment, and installing stronger, tree-resistant aerial cable.

These energy grid enhancements are part of Atlantic City Electric's broader strategic effort to modernize and strengthen the local energy grid serving southern New Jersey. These upgrades continue to improve reliability for customers by reducing the frequency and duration of outages.

To learn more about ongoing reliability projects across South Jersey, visit atlanticcityelectric.com/reliability.

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