A message from General Manager, Tom Wolfenbarger

We apologize for the inconveniences caused by power outages you experienced Thursday, September 19 and Friday, September 20. We realize outages on consecutive days are an inconvenience to you and these occurrences do not meet our standard for reliability.

The outage Thursday, September 19 was caused by a car accident impacting a Duke Energy transmission line on U.S. 27. The outage Friday, September 20 was also caused by a Duke Energy transmission outage. Duke Energy is still analyzing the September 20 outage, but we understand it to be a result of a series of events which impacted multiple transmission lines affecting a widespread area. Because multiple lines were impacted at the same time, troubleshooting the location of the issues was hampered and the restoral time on September 20 was longer than it was September 19.

There is often confusion about how an event on Duke Energy’s transmission system impacts members of Butler Rural Electric Cooperative. Cooperative members are impacted by Duke Energy transmission outages because Butler Rural Electric Cooperative's distribution substations are connected to Duke Energy transmission lines. Cooperatives and municipal utilities in Ohio contract and pay for transmission service from the investor-owned utilities in the state. This is done to prevent duplication of facilities and to minimize costs for all Ohio consumers. 

During both outages, to reduce outage times, we used remote switching on our distribution circuits to switch the source of power for as many members as possible. Unfortunately, transmission circuits often supply multiple distribution substations and some of our circuits lost both their primary substation source of power and their backup source.

The cooperative continually communicates with Duke Energy regarding transmission reliability.

Duke Energy is working on its new Ross Substation south of Millville. Once finished, this transmission substation will improve reliability for members served by our Colerain, Ross, Layhigh, Stillwell Beckett, Oxford, and Reily substations. This includes members in Colerain, Fairfield, Hanover, Milford, Morgan, Oxford, Reily, Ross, and St. Clair townships. The project is already underway and is anticipated to be finished within the next couple of years. Butler Rural Electric Cooperative is not funding the improvements but supports the project because it will improve reliability for a large portion of our members.

Again, we apologize for the inconveniences the outages caused. We appreciate your patience as we worked to automatically switch power to reduce your outage time. We will continue to strive to give you reliable service.