The CRC is fortunate to be one of very few business parks in the world that have 2 major electrical feeds coming into the park. This in essence gives us a "backup" power feed so that if one goes down VT Electric can switch over to the other feed into the park so we have electricity. While this system does not guarantee we will always have power the track record so far is excellent. Prior to the outage we had recently which took out several buildings, we have only lost electricity for a long period in 1990 and 1994! That record of reliability is way beyond what AEP or any other provider has!

The most recent outage was caused by an incident that tripped out both feeds at once - an event whose probability is so low as to be many places behind the decimal point. But as noted above, every few years those laws of probability do catch up with us so how best for your company to plan for such events?

First, keep in mind that the second feed switchover is not automatic.
If electricity is lost on the main feed then VT Electric must go to the several switches located throughout the park and manually switch to the other feed. This can take up to several hours depending on the circumstances and the cause of the outage. You need to plan for these "short" outages by having battery UPS's for your computers that will allow a shutdown without losing information.

Second, in the highly unlikely event that both feeds are down you need to be prepared for a much longer timeframe of no power. Events of this nature can be caused by outages that occur because of major storms that take out power in the whole region and we then lose both feeds instead of just one. This is what happened in 1990 and 1994. If your business or computers or labs have to stay up under any and all circumstances then you need to purchase a backup generator as many tenants have done.

You may want to develop a response plan about what your company needs to do if being "up" energy wise is critical to your operation. If you have any questions about how our electrical service is structured, feel free to email Paul Fleming.