Dive Summary:
- In a New York Times opinion piece called "Squirrel Power!," writer Jon Mooallem outlines the frequency and severity of the problem caused by a uniquely furry threat to the U.S. power grid—squirrels.
- According to Mooallem, squirrels are the cause of 300 power outages in Austin, Texas annually while utilities claim between 7%-20% of outages are caused by wild animals and a California study from 2005 estimates that squirrel-induced outages cost the state's economy between $32-$317 million per year.
- Matthew Olearczyk, program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, claims that utilities have been aware of the problem for many years and that squirrel-induced outages are on the decline as utilities have experimented with many innovative—if not always entirely successful—methods of preventing this squirrelly problem:
"For at least a decade, utility companies have been tricking out their equipment with an array of wildlife deterrents to combat the problem, like “arrester caps” and “bushing covers,” the Southwire SquirrelShield, the E/Getaway Guard and free-spinning baffles to make squirrels lose their balance. [...] The industry has also researched discouraging squirrels by spraying utility poles with fox urine and painting equipment red, though both of these tactics have failed; it’s not even clear whether squirrels can see the color red. Some utilities have installed the kind of plastic owl used to keep pigeons off building facades. However, an industry study notes, “one utility reported that the fake owl was attacked by a hawk which in turn caused a substation outage.”
From the article:
A power outage caused by a squirrel feels so surprising only because we’ve come to see our electrical grid — all these wires with which, little by little, we’ve battened down the continent — as a constant. Electricity everywhere, at the flick of a switch, seems like the natural order, while the actual natural order — the squirrel programmed by evolution to gnaw and eat acorns and bask and leap and scamper — winds up feeling like a preposterous, alien glitch in that system. It’s a pretty stunning reversal, if you can clear the right kind of space to reflect on it, and fortunately power outages caused by squirrels do that for you by shutting off your TV and Internet.
After the city of Fort Meade, Fla., suffered more than two dozen P.O.C.B.S. in a year, a resident told a reporter: “I just didn’t think a squirrel could make the lights go out. They’re just tiny little things.” A century ago, a shrewd squirrel might have been equally skeptical about our ability to make so many lights go on, watching a few little humans raise the first wooden pole.