Penelec continually invests in the communities in their service area to upgrade power lines and substations to enhance electric service reliability for customers. As part of these investments, utility crews are at work every day in your community.

Over the next five years, Penelec will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to perform this critical work at thousands of locations. No matter the job, crews must be able to work safely. That could require proactively de-energizing power lines to prevent employees from accidentally contacting live wires in tight quarters, which can have deadly consequences.

A planned power outage might sound counterintuitive coming from the electric company since their job is to keep the lights on. However, keeping employees and the public safe is the reason scheduled power outages are necessary.

While there is never a convenient time to be without electricity, they try to avoid disrupting power at the most critical times, such as during bitter cold or blazing hot weather. Penelec also works to minimize interruptions to schools when they are in session and consult large industrial customers with sensitive machinery and manufacturing processes to find out what times are best for them.

Penelec reaches out to all customers using an automated phone call. They know which customers will be impacted by a planned outage and contact only those who will be affected. Their ability to contact customers directly by phone is only as good as the phone number they have for the account.

If you’ve changed your telephone number, you can update your account information by calling Penelec at 1-800-545-7741. Better yet, sign up for text message alerts at www.firstenergycorp.com/connect. This is particularly important for businesses with automated answering systems that effectively block automated or “robo” calls.

For more information contact Penelec at 1-800-545-7741.

This article was published in the Venango Chamber’s April 2021 VenangoWorks! Newsletter.