The company’s engineers are now working on contingency plans that will ensure safe and quick restoration of electricity supplies to local homes and businesses, if blizzards, storms or flooding hit the area.
SEPD Melksham depot operations manager Paul Gallacher said the company’s first priority is to get the electricity back to normal as quickly as possible in the event of power cuts.
”We have invested millions in making our network more robust and have also made a real effort over recent years to make it easier for customers to access information and communicate with us,” Gallacher added.
Specifically, the company is investing £6m on automation of local, neighborhood substations to facilitate quick switching of supplies from another source if there is a power cut.
Additional amount is being invested on enhancement and capacity increment of the underground cabling network, purchase of additional 4×4 vehicles to reach more difficult to access areas of the network in bad weather, engineering equipment for fault repair and new mobile generators, as well as on ensuring availability of helicopter patrols for overhead lines monitoring in the event of storms.
SEPD is spending approximately £90m this year to upgrade and maintain its network in central southern England.
