PSEG Long Island makes major summer upgrades to bolster grid resiliency

PSEG Long Island, which provides electric service to some 1.2 million customers in New York’s Long Island and the Rockaways, has made numerous upgrades to the electric grid, its systems, and its storm processes, including contingency procedures.

PSEG Long Island, which operates the Long Island Power Authority’s transmission and distribution system under a long-term contract, is a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a publicly traded diversified energy company.

Across its service area, the company has prepared the electric infrastructure by focusing on substation and transmission and distribution improvements, as well as by performing circuit and equipment inspections using helicopters and infrared technology.

For instance, PSEG Long Island’s infrastructure improvements this summer include the installation of a new 33 kilovolt (kV) underground transmission circuit in the Rockaways to provide additional capacity that will accommodate load growth on the Rockaway Beach Peninsula.

Additionally, the company upgraded 69 kV substation facilities to handle South Fork Wind offshore wind renewable generation interconnecting in East Hampton, and completed 33 kV substation conversions at the Buell, Amagansett, Navy Road, Culloden Point, and Hero substations to improve reliability and add capacity during peak demand in the East End.

The company also has reconfigured transmission circuits in the Hewlett area to enhance the reliability of the transmission system, installed new or upgraded distribution transformers in the Brooklyn Avenue and Bridgehampton substations to provide more capacity, and replaced switchgears at East Garden City, Elwood, and West Hempstead substations.

PSEG Long Island also is installing or upgrading five new distribution feeder lines in the Park Place, Elwood, Brooklyn Avenue, and Bridgehampton areas to accommodate load growth.

Additionally, the company has completed storm hardening and reliability work on more than 1,000 miles of distribution mainline circuits to date, and plans to continue such work via its Power On initiative.

Started in 2020, Power On will continue to improve reliability by strengthening distribution lines, the company said, adding that since the launch, an additional 352 miles or more of distribution mainline circuits have been storm hardened with stronger poles, thicker wire and other modern equipment.

These investments, added the company, have strengthened the system so that fewer customers experience outages and, when they do occur, the duration is shorter.

To further protect against storm damage to the energy grid, arborists from PSEG Long Island’s Tree Trimming program are working year round to identify and trim tree limbs in rights of way and along easements that could potentially cause outages during or after a storm.

Since 2014, more than 118,000 hazardous trees and/or large limbs have been removed along the distribution and transmission system, and over 26,400 miles of distribution and transmission line clearance has been made via trimming.

In addition, PSEG Long Island said its vine mitigation program has identified, cut, and treated more than 21,000 vine locations across Long Island and the Rockaways.

At the same time, PSEG Long Island employees this summer have been attending annual hurricane and tropical storm drills and employee training. Emergency summer operating plans are being developed and employees are performing summer-peak reliability analyses to ensure there is sufficient capacity to meet electric demand on high-heat days.

PSEG Long Island’s reliability investments are not going unnoticed by customers. The company’s overall 2023 J.D. Power residential customer satisfaction survey results increased by 12 points, moving PSEG Long Island into the second quartile among large utilities in the East, driven primarily by significant improvements in satisfaction around the survey’s categories of Power Quality & Reliability and Corporate Citizenship.

The company also announced that the findings of its recent Climate Change Vulnerability Study are shaping an in-depth Climate Change Resilience Plan that will be published later this year.

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