Birds

Birds regularly compete with squirrels as the leading cause of substation outages. Besides the outages caused by birds making contact with electrical components, bird droppings are corrosive, conductive, and hazardous. The acidic nature of bird dropping build-up corrodes expensive equipment, becomes conductive with moisture, and contains harmful bacteria which creates an extremely hazardous work environment.

In addition, bird eggs and fledglings are a food source – and an attraction — for predators like raccoons and snakes, which enter substations and cause outages. Thousands of dollars annually are spent removing bird droppings and nesting materials from valuable electrical equipment.