Improving Your Electric Service

Dominion customers should never have to worry about the quality or reliability of their electric service. That’s our job, and our employees work hard every day to guarantee that Dominion customers have top-notch electric service.

At Dominion, we believe the delivery of superior service starts with well-designed, well-built electric infrastructure. Dominion makes prudent investments every year to add new transmission and distribution lines and substations, and new technologies that help minimize service interruptions and help crews easily locate problems and restore power more efficiently when outages do occur.

Perhaps most important to Dominion’s promise of delivering a reliable supply of power to customers’ homes are our everyday maintenance, inspection, tree trimming and equipment improvement programs.

Inspections and Maintenance

Just like your car or home, Dominion’s electric distribution system – the poles, wires, and other equipment that supply electricity to your neighborhood, home or business – requires routine inspections and maintenance to keep it in good running condition.

Equipment Improvements

Own a car or home for a long period of time, and you may have to rebuild the transmission or replace kitchen appliances to make sure they continue running efficiently and to avoid an unexpected breakdown. Well, Dominion’s electric distribution system is no different. To keep it running reliably, we make targeted improvements to overhead and underground equipment – replacing, repairing, or just bringing it up to new standards – so that it is more resistant to damage from storms, wildlife, and equipment failure. This work includes replacing wires, transformers, poles, and other distribution materials and equipment, which even includes substation equipment.

At times, it is necessary to interrupt a customer’s service to make improvements to this system, but Dominion employees try to keep these planned outages as brief as possible. Let’s face it, being without electricity is never convenient, and Dominion will let you know the date and time of the planned outage to minimize that inconvenience.

The video below highlights one of Dominion’s equipment improvement projects:

Tree Maintenance and Pruning

Trees are valuable assets in our communities. They beautify neighborhoods, provide wildlife habitat and shade in the summer and wind blocks in the winter. Our goals for pruning are to help keep trees healthy as we improve service reliability and access for maintenance crews in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.

Trees and limbs can fall or grow into power lines, become hazardous and interrupt service. To promote safety and service reliability, Dominion uses integrated vegetation management to manage trees and vegetation along its rights-of-way.

Integrated vegetation management includes periodic pruning, removal of danger trees, mowing, herbicide use and public education. Dominion’s contractors are trained in pruning methods adopted by the International Society of Arboriculture and the National Arborist Association. Only specially trained professionals are permitted to cut trees close to power lines or to remove limbs that fall on lines. State law requires everyone else to stay at least 10 feet away from power lines.

While Dominion’s normal pruning of rights-of-way occurs on a three-year cycle, we continuously identify and take action to eliminate immediate threats to our lines.