Restoring electricity after a storm

by Shannon Tangonan | Sept. 24, 2019

Crews worked to safely restore power in a challenging environment on Hawaii Island.

I don’t want to jinx it, but it hasn’t been that bad so far this hurricane season. Last year it was an entirely different story — Hector, Lane, Norman, Olivia came at us one after another.

Those storms proved that no matter how hard our companies work to upgrade poles and equipment to improve resilience, no electric system is immune to outages when a powerful storm hits.

If a storm hits, crews will most likely have to make repairs to equipment and infrastructure before safely restoring power to your area.

In the aftermath of a storm, you may wonder how our crews go about restoring electricity to customers. There is a method to it, although it may not seem that way if the people across the street have power and you don’t.

I read something earlier this summer about the power restoration process that made me laugh…especially since I work at Hawaiian Electric.

Columnist Dave Barry, in Lessons from Lucy, compared power restoration in Florida to “the Rapture, which, some Christians believe, is an unknown time in the future when God will snatch the righteous off the face of the Earth and take them up to heaven. Getting our power back is like that, except instead of God deciding who gets raptured, it’s Florida Power & Light.”

In reality, that isn’t the way FPL or the Hawaiian Electric Companies respond after a major outage. We don’t get to handpick which customers get restored first, but we do make sure all critical facilities (hospitals, etc.) receive priority.

Critical facilities such as hospitals will get priority over residential neighborhoods during the restoration process.

In general, our companies don’t restore power based on when customers report an outage, where customers live or the status of accounts. Rather, we begin with multiple locations and follow an overall plan that focuses on restoring power to the largest number of customers safely and as quickly as possible. This is how we prioritize:

• Repair damage to our power plants and transmission lines that carry electricity from our plants to local substations
• Restore power to critical facilities such as hospitals, water pumping sites, wastewater plants, military facilities, and the airports
• Work to return service to the largest number of customers in the shortest amount of time
• Repair the infrastructure serving smaller groups and neighborhoods, converging on the hardest hit areas until every customer’s power is restored

Visit our website for more information on our restoration process at www.hawaiianelectric.com/restorationprocess.

Oahu residents can access the island’s outage map via the mobile app; free download available on Apple App and Google Play stores. In the event of a major storm, please check our websites for maps with updated outage counts and estimated restoration times (if available) across our five-island service territory. Also, be sure to monitor our social media accounts.

Rooftop Solar Safety

If you own a rooftop solar system — there are about 80,000 systems across the five islands we serve — take the time to speak with your contractor about how to operate your specific system during hurricane season, which runs through Nov. 30. You can also get safety tips from our Handbook for Emergency Preparedness or download our free “Safety Tips for Rooftop Solar homeowners” at www.hawaiianelectric.com/rooftopsolarsafety.

Shannon Tangonan is a manager of external corporate communications at Hawaiian Electric Company.