How We Restore Power

The Importance of Reporting Outages
When a power outage occurs at your home or business, visit the Austin Energy Storm Center and select either Check Outage or Report Outage from the upper right of the page, or call Austin Energy’s automated reporting system at (512) 322-9100.

It is important that every customer experiencing an outage call in. Your outage may be unrelated to your neighbor’s outage or other customers on the street.

For example, each transformer on a power pole serves five or six homes. This could mean a small group of homes could experience an outage while homes further down the street may still have power. As each customer call helps us better pinpoint the location of the specific equipment or power line causing the problem.

Restoring Power
We repair most small, routine outages within an hour. Ten crews are on standby 24 hours a day, seven days a week to immediately respond to outages.

Major power outages caused by storms or freezing rain may require more crews. It may take up to 30 repair crews multiple hours to restore power to all customers.

The crews must drive to each location that needs repairs. During a major storm, it is not uncommon to have several hundred repair locations.

Why Outages Occur
Fuses protect every power line and major piece of equipment in the electric system. When a power line overloads due to a lightning strike or a fallen tree limb, fuses blow and an outage occurs.

The fuses protect power lines and equipment from overload. Without this protection lines and equipment could burn up, requiring more costly and time consuming repairs and replacement.

Austin Energy has a computerized outage management system to efficiently pinpoint and dispatch crews. Once fully implemented, this system will generate an estimated repair time for each outage during major storms.

Providing Updates to the Public
When major outages occur, Austin Energy provides periodic updates to the media and posts information to the Austin Energy Web site home page. The updates include the cause of outages and areas of our service area most affected.