How We Provide Reliable Service

Since 1941, we’ve been committed to keeping the lights on, rain or shine. We also want you to know your water will be hot, your phones will be charged, and, most importantly, the electricity you use is safe. We spend much of our customer relations time and energy on communicating with you when there are hiccups in service and, in turn, opening up your lines of communication to us via as many avenues as possible. But it is equally important for all our member-owners to be able to trust in our reliability and know what we’re doing – and improving – in our systems to keep your life running smoothly.

New Horizon is owned by the five upstate South Carolina cooperatives. For many of our substations, they own and maintain the high side, or where transmission lines enter the station. New Horizon also works with YEC to help us maintain the equipment inside the substation, increasing reliability for members.

Here’s a summary of our combined efforts to keep everything in optimum working order:

Vegetation Maintenance

Right-of-way vegetation maintenance is one way YEC controls the delivery of safe and reliable electric service. Clearing limbs and trees away from power lines not only helps to prevent outages and blinking lights, it also reduces many potential hazards.

Utility Poles

Continued maintenance on the lines and poles delivering power to your home is necessary to preserve our high standards of service, and we want you to have peace-of-mind that YEC is diligent about this upkeep.

Substation Maintenance

YEC substations and lines require maintenance to effectively and reliably deliver power. That includes replacing outdated equipment where high voltage lines enter the substation, adding transformers to increase capacity for population growth, and upgrades in technology to help isolate outages and improve restoration times.

Operations Center

From our greatly-improved operations center, we can use technology to locate outages, dispatch our lineworkers, focus on safety and organization, and communicate important information to our employees in the field. Although we might not be outside, our connections and communications to employees working across our service territory puts us in the trenches with them when it matters most.

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)

This new technology will help prepare YEC for the electric power industry’s fast-paced technological advancements.

Voltage Regulator Maintenance

A voltage regulator automatically maintains a constant voltage level and is important in providing steady reliability. 

We utilize proven technologies (supervisory control and data acquisition) to monitor all substation regulators, so anytime we see an alarm, we are able to address the situation and identify potential problems within two days. New Horizon Electric Cooperative completes a visual inspection on all regulators each month, followed by YEC’s quarterly visual inspections. Additionally, YEC places all substation regulators on a 5-year rotation for maintenance and oil checks, while down line regulators are inspected every year and the oil is tested on a 5-year rotation. 

Infrared Scanning Technology

New Horizon Electric uses infrared technology to test for potential problems each summer, when the load is the highest, e.g. when most people are using the most power, to ensure it is handled well.

By the Numbers: Performance & Reliability Metrics

While statistics and numbers are no comfort when the power is out, we do keep track of all the details on outages. YEC uses these metrics to determine where we fail, where we succeed, and where we can improve (or have improved) so we can ultimately provide the best service possible. These are the measurements we employ:

• SAIDI – System Average Interruption Duration Index: The total amount of time the average member is without power during the year in minutes.
• SAIFI – System Average Interruption Frequency Index: The number of times the average member is without power during the year in minutes.
• CAIDI – Customer Average Interruption Duration Index: The average duration of the outage for the average member during the year in minutes.

Service Interruptions

Watch the Reliability Metrics Video

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA)

As always, please report outages by calling 1-866-374-1234 or texting 352667 (text enrollment required).