SAN ANTONIO — Electricity and natural gas. We use it. We need it.
CPS Energy has 3,100 skilled team workers who work diligently to provide critical services that support lives and the necessities of their customers as well as the safety and well-being of our community.
Brian Gutierrez, the Manager of Power Quality and Technical Solutions with CPS Energy told us, "When customers turn on the lights they fully expect the lights to come on, so as the electric and natural gas provider for the city of San Antonio and surrounding areas we strive to deliver safe reliable environmentally sound as well as affordable services to meet their needs."
That's why keeping the lights on is their number one priority and they take steps to mitigate those outages.
Gutierrez said, "We regularly trim trees that threaten the powerlines. We install equipment that minimizes some of the risks of the outages to our customers and we are constantly improving our procedures and processes responding to these outages."
There are many reasons why power outages occur including vehicle accidents, wildlife impacting powerlines, animals crawling into substation equipment, but the big one is weather-related events.
But if you ever notice your power is out and not your neighbor's, you may be able to fix it yourself. Gutierrez added, "They can check the breakers you just go out to the breaker panel open the panel up and see if one of them are thrown because the event might be just located at their residence and not the whole area."
And CPS Energy has upgraded its interactive power outage map to update every 5 instead of 15 minutes. It also gives more information about outages.
They've also got a new program called Notify.
Gutierrez said, "Notify is a really neat feature that you can sign up for alerts on email or text on your phone that's going to tell you about your outage."
Gutierrez also says if you are out and about and see a line down not to go near it because it could still be electrified, and to call CPS Energy right away.
Here is a link to the CPS Energy Power Outage Center.
Here is a link to the CPS Energy Manage My Account page where you can sign up for their Notify program.