JCP&L project aims to cut outages

Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) has begun work on a project designed to prevent or minimize the impact of power outages on more than 5,000 customers in northern New Jersey.

The work will take place along multiple power lines running from JCP&L’s Cozy Lake substation.

It aims to help customers in Hardyston and Sparta in Sussex County, West Milford in Passaic County, and Jefferson and Rockaway in Morris County.

“The investments we are making in these local communities are some of the largest and most extensive enhancements in our New Jersey Reliability Improvement Program,” said Doug Mokoid, president, New Jersey at FirstEnergy, JCP&L’s parent company.

“We are taking an all-of-the-above approach to enhancing service reliability by conducting work to address vegetation management, line resiliency, load balancing, and incorporating more flexibility and redundancy to our system.”

Enhanced tree-trimming work, including the removal of diseased or dead trees, is under way along the power line routes.

Several grid infrastructure enhancements are planned, including:

• Upgrading nearly 11.5 miles of infrastructure with thicker, stronger poles and overhead wire that can carry more electricity safely and provide more resiliency in storms.

• Constructing more than three miles of new underground lines.

• Installing nearly 60 additional devices that can help isolate damage and restore customers when outages occur. This includes new TripSaver devices, which sense temporary abnormalities along power lines, such as a tree branch bouncing off lines, and automatically re-energize the line after the condition has passed without having to send a crew to investigate.

• Transferring more than 2,400 customers to neighboring power lines, placing them closer to substations to reduce the risk of outages, and provide improved load balancing and flexibility if outages occur.

As part of the work, parts of lines along Route 23 will be moved closer to the road and fiberglass poles and crossarms will be installed to provide enhanced resiliency against tree-related outages.

The work is part of JCP&L’s New Jersey Reliability Improvement Program, a two-phase effort to enhance reliability for customers on high-priority lines selected based on historical outage data.

The first phase includes a minimum of $95 million in upgrades in three years.

The New Jersey Reliability Improvement Program is part of Energize365, FirstEnergy’s grid evolution program focused on investing $26 billion between 2024 and 2028 in its six-state footprint.

JCP&L serves 1.1 million customers in Burlington, Essex, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties.

FirstEnergy serves more than 6 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York.