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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Energy Adviser: What’s happening behind your wall plug?

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You throw a switch, plug in a gizmo and suddenly electricity brings you light, music, entertaining images or a connection to the wide world of information. You find the same little rectangles are on the walls of apartments, homes, hotels, and classrooms.

Most of us are familiar with things that use electricity. We know that Clark Public Utilities provides it to us. We know the power lines overhead traveling to the green boxes in the neighbors’ yard have something to do with it. We might even recall we’re not supposed to play around them and that we should stay away from a downed power line, whether it’s jumping and sparking or not. However, we don’t really know how electricity gets to our wall sockets and light switches, even though we use them all day, every day.

Let’s travel backwards from a wall socket to where electricity comes from so you can see there are many steps and many people involved in lighting your home, making it comfortable and delivering entertainment.

The electricity at a socket comes from lines attached to the green transformer box, or sometimes a transformer on a pole. Underground lines bring high-voltage electricity to the green box and overhead ones connect into the can on a pole. Both “transform” a voltage that’s too powerful for your house into the 120 volts your house and your neighbors’ use.

The lines leaving the green box may travel back several miles. They are sometimes underground and sometimes above ground on poles. All lines eventually connect to above-ground equipment at a substation. This substation also breaks even higher voltages it receives into lower ones suitable for distribution to your neighborhood pole transformer or green box transformer on the ground. The lines from the substation are distribution lines, and the network of power lines from the substation is the distribution network.

The substation also receives high-voltage transmission lines. The lines travel backward from there on transmission towers. These tall wooden poles or metal Eifel Tower-looking structures carry high-voltage lines across the country through fields, along highways and over neighborhoods back to the source of your electricity.

As secondary energy, electricity must be created from another source of energy. In Clark County, most of ours comes from hydropower generated by federally operated hydroelectric dams, but other sources include solar, wind and natural gas.

Living on the grid

These power generators, transmission lines, substations, distribution lines and transformers make up what’s commonly called the power grid. And this interconnected system is what delivers power from the source, to the electric sockets in your home or business.

Clark Public Utilities delivers and manages electricity going across 6,600 miles of power lines and more than 59,000 poles to more than 193,000 homes and businesses spread across the 628 square miles of the county. And, the utility handles this with about 350 full-time employees.

Reliability is key when maintaining an electric system and Clark Public Utilities prides itself on providing some of the most reliable service around, at the lowest cost possible and with the best customer service. But outages do still happen. Because the system is built in circuits, all outage repairs need to start at the highest level. Which means that after immediate safety concerns like fires are addressed, the utility crews start with transmission lines, then substations and on down to the lines delivering power to homes and businesses. That way, when the downed line at the end of a driveway is repaired, the power is already flowing from the rest of the system to the home.

More information on the electric system, power supply and safety is available at the new Clark Public Utilities website, www.ClarkPublicUtilities.com.


 

Energy Adviser is written by Clark Public Utilities. Send questions to ecod@clarkpud.com or to Energy Adviser, c/o Clark Public Utilities, P.O. Box 8900, Vancouver, WA 98668.

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