Before temperatures peak in the North Texas summer, Oncor employees have been working for months in advance with a focus on reducing the number of power outages and their duration.

Whether it’s in the Oncor Lab or up in a bucket truck, employees begin working in the winter and spring to search our system for equipment that could be vulnerable to extreme temperatures.

Each year, the Oncor Lab tests thousands of oil samples from transformers on our Transmission system. The dissolved gas concentrations in these samples can show if a transformer is in good health or a potential problem.

“When we look at the gases in a transformer, it’s kind of like looking at your physical for the year,” said Diana Khamvongsa, Senior Chemist. “So the same thing with the transformer. Every year, we want to make sure the transformer is performing great.”

Our Distribution group, which oversees the poles and wires carrying the power directly to homes and businesses, analyzes meter data to search for overloaded transformers and have the potential to fail in the heat of the summer.

 “It’s a great benefit to the customer that we work those overloads,” said Drew Akins, District Manager, Fort Worth. “We’ll schedule that transformer for replacement beforehand, before it goes out, do that proactively.”

Oncor is also over halfway through a 10-year, $700 million program to install smart equipment on its system that, in some cases, can restore power automatically before dispatching a lineman to make repairs.

“The Distribution Automation program was launched at Oncor in order to modernize our grid,” said Adey Gebregiorgis, Program Manager. “And we do that by deploying various different equipment that have the capability of sensing power flow and optimizing it whenever there’s some kind of abnormalities, like a fault that happens.”

“In extreme temperatures, what automation can help us do is redistribute load and thereby avoiding excessive overload on our circuits,” said Daniel Genthe, Program Manager Senior.