Maintaining power reliability

When an outage occurs on primary transmission lines, power is pushed on to other transmission lines, which may not be designed to carry that amount of power and which may become overloaded and fail, resulting in "blackouts" and "brownouts". To prevent these events, power companies carry out various programs to maintain power reliability on the transmission system:

• carrying out preventive maintenance programs
  
  
• using advanced technology to precisely measure the capability of transmission lines
  
  
• tracking the frequency and duration of outages
  
  
• using interconnections with adjacent power systems in Canada and the United States to maintain power supply and reliability
  
  
• planning and building new transmission lines to increase system
  capacity
  
  
• sharing information through industry associations, such as the Canadian Electricity Association and the North American Electric Reliability Council