Your cooperative delivers exceptional reliability.
Reliability means more than just keeping the lights on — it’s about working with our members to keep their communities and lives running smoothly. That’s why we remain committed to proactive maintenance that strengthens our system, improves efficiency, and helps us deliver reliable power at affordable rates. Our commitment to our mission pays off with dependable service for our members.
Anything but average
In 2024, PEC outage times were less than half that of the most recently reported Texas average, based on outage minutes per year reported by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The average member was without power for less than one hour for the year!
On a cooperative scale
On a system as large and spread out as PEC’s, such reliability is more complicated to achieve than in more urban areas served by investor-owned and municipal utilities. PEC maintains more than 25,000 miles of distribution line in an 8,100 square mile service territory — bigger than the land area of New Jersey! That means longer drives for crews to arrive on-site, and the affected equipment can be harder to identify and reach in rough terrain where equipment is more spread out.
How it’s done
As a nonprofit cooperative, we work for you, not for investors. Instead of the rates you pay going into private pockets, we invest in infrastructure and maintenance that keeps the system running smoothly, and any excess margins are returned to members through capital credits.
PEC’s dedicated teams in the control center and in the field stand ready 24/7 to restore your power as quickly and safely as possible. But building reliability starts with addressing issues before they can cause outages. Here are a few ways PEC does it:
- Maintenance
This past year, we inspected more than 43,200 poles and 1,720 pieces of field equipment, reinforcing the strength of our system and the delivery of safe, reliable service for our members.
- Vegetation maintenance
By utilizing LiDAR and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, our teams get a closer, more detailed view of our above-ground infrastructure, allowing us to spot potential issues before there’s a problem.
- AMI
In 2024, we were proud to see the completion of our years-long Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project. This technology enhances communication between our system, the control center, and our crews, improving outage response times and helping us keep a keener eye on our infrastructure. AMI meters also provide our members with a detailed view of their energy use and a better understanding of when they are using the most energy.
