Safeguarding Utilities: Strategies for Outage Mitigation and Wildlife Protection
Watch On-DemandPossums, birds, rats, snakes and even squirrels are all capable of causing power outages. Animals climb around substations; birds perch on transformers; they are seeking a safe, warm place to shelter and nest. Even small birds or rodents can cause problems by attracting larger predators.
The interaction between wildlife and electrical equipment can have multiple outcomes from electrocution, to faults, to wildfires. These occur when wildlife cause a phase to phase or phase to ground fault with their body. Our product solutions can reduce fire risk related to wildlife and vegetation clashing with your substation or overhead lines.
Insulating and Isolating components help mitigating active threats and reduce the risk of outage and associated risk of fire related to wildlife interactions with energized lines. Such strategic investment provides a return by protecting assets and communities from costly and potentially catastrophic wildlife interference.
TE’s wildlife and asset protection material formulations are designed to:
- Perform reliability for 40+ years without impactful deterioration in performance.
- Minimize the risk of fire ignition associated with normal and abnormal utility environments with our standard materials.
- Extend the performance to add V0 for those customers who require it.
Our proprietary material formulations offer anywhere durability – even in HV-polluted environments. Made from non-tracking material, TE's Raychem Wildlife and Asset Protection portfolio is optimized to ensure tracking resistance, thermal endurance, and UV resistance for high performance protection of your assets throughout their service lifetime. This "install and forget" reliability is the result of 60+ years of dedication to research, development and materials science. Our Wildlife and Asset Protection experts are ready to support you with a broad range of reliable insulation solutions - customizable to your application.
Read our white paper written by our Wildlife and Asset Protection expert to learn how you can increase reliability and reduce wildlife-related fire risk.
Reliability improvement is possible by insulating vulnerable assets in substations. Customizable TE solutions are used around the world to effectively insulate thousands of substations every year from risk of outage caused by wildlife, vegetation, extreme weather events and accidental contact as well as reduce fire risk associated with animal electrocution. We engineer solutions to enhance insulation clearances and exclude wildlife from high risk areas. Our products are easy to install and designed/manufactured to last the lifetime of your assets in the toughest environments.
Reduce outages and fire risk in overhead lines while protecting endangered wildlife. Outage and fire risks can be reduced and eliminated with effective insulation of high risk elements of the overhead line. TE has insulated millions of miles and kilometers of bare conductor in distribution lines around the world. Our raptor covers, fuse cut out covers, re-closer and distribution covers protect pole mounted equipment from accidental and momentary contact from nesting and perching birds and storm debris. Most can be installed on energized equipment and are available in seamless one-piece designs for complete wildlife and vegetation management.
How to reduce clearances while working in tight spaces, or upgrade insulation levels? TE’s insulating portfolio is used in air and gas insulated switchgear to provide insulation on busbars and gas vacuum bottles in order to help our customers design more compact and reliable equipment. Our solutions can enhance insulation factors of safety, combining air space clearance while the materials used in our insulating covers are engineered to be compact and mitigate risk of fires in accordance with IEC 60616.
Reliability Enhancement in Industrial Applications? Every minute of downtime impacts commercial performance in certain industrial applications like data-centers, solar/wind parks, rail and oil and gas networks. TE understands that downtime can be detrimental to TE's customers, including hospitals, schools and security operators/institutions/organizations. Our solutions in insulation enhancement and asset protection offer our partners the opportunity to minimize risk in relation to wildlife, storm and weather interference and improve SAIDI and SAIFI metrics reported to regulators.
Localized fires caused by critters (squirrels, birds, possums…) infiltrating your overhead lines and substations are often the result of electrocution. They fall to the ground below and spark a fire. We can help you prevent animal induced wildfires and bushfires with our wide selection of insulating wildlife mitigation solutions including bushing covers, cross arm guards and more. Each is manufactured from our unique Raychem polymer material. It’s specially formulated to resist tracking, UV degradation, thermal extremes and heat resistance. We are committed to protecting your network for the life of your assets and reducing the risks of wildfire and bushfires with 60+ years of manufacturing and design experience.
A Swiss utility improves the reliability of its overhead lines, reduces outages and minimizes the need for trimming while safeguarding trees.
TE Connectivity's plant in Fuquay-Varina is turning out products used worldwide to protect the power grid from animals, and animals from those high voltage areas.
How does wildlife cause major outages?
The city of Gastonia in North Carolina installed TE Wildlife protection products in its substations to keep the power on and reduce squirrel electrical contact.