Birds and other wildlife gain access to outdoor substation equipment, build nests, and eventually cause equipment failures when wildlife makes contact with exposed energized substation equipment. Animals/Rodents (mice, rats, opossum, skunks, cats, etc.) access ground level cable troughs and chew through control wiring, causing system malfunctions. Many of the issues are in substations located close to O’Hare airport, and therefore serve important, high profile customers that are very sensitive to power interruptions (outages). Outages at these locations result in high level management involvement within ComEd as well as coordination with airport and city officials to resolve in a timely manner. There are several species of birds and rodents that seem to be prevalent in the area. Some building nests as quickly as one week, therefore making it difficult to create an inspection routine that is frequent enough to identify nests during regularly planned inspections. Outages and repairs are expensive. Response to un-planned outages requires diverting resources from other [planned] work. Previous solutions are expensive and ineffective
The objective of this IPRO project is to recommend a new strategy for ComEd to implement to reduce wildlife intrusion in substation equipment and therefore reduce wildlife related equipment outages. The IPRO team will tackle this objective by undertaking the types of tasks and activities outlined below. This approach will be further discussed and refined by the team through conversations with the IPRO instructors and ComEd representatives: