Green jackets at Liberty's Meyers Substation in South Lake Tahoe, CA.
Liberty works to maintain and improve system reliability while also reducing the risk of electrical infrastructure ignited wildfires. Contact with electrical infrastructure that causes a ground is one of the most typical causes of power outages. When this occurs at a substation, the outage can affect thousands of customers.
To help prevent these kinds of outages, Liberty is installing green jackets, which are simple, yet effective plastic coverings used on electrical infrastructure, particularly inside substations. The coverings are custom-designed to fit transformers, wire, and connections that are at risk of grounding electricity if something touches them. Green jackets also help to reduce the frequency of power outages and decrease the risk of a wildfire ignition from electrical infrastructure. Preventing contact with electrical infrastructure by an object or animal helps to improve service reliability, mitigate wildfire risk, and even save the lives of animals.
Safe installation of green jackets requires power to be cut to the substation. To minimize the impact to customers, Liberty crews typically install green jackets late at night when most customers are sleeping.
Green jackets are one example of Liberty’s proactive approach to wildfire mitigation and electric service reliability.