Why does my power go out? 

Polk-Burnett employees work hard to keep your lights on, and members experience an average of less than one hour without power per year, excluding storms and major events. Some outages impact a single member, while others impact several hundred members. Our goal is to reduce the number and length of outages for all members, and when the power goes out, crews respond quickly to restore outages, while keeping you informed.

The most common type of outage is a planned outage.
These are necessary power interruptions to safely rebuild portions of the electric system. Planned outages impact a small number of members and can last from a couple minutes to a couple hours. Each year, the co-op schedules about 1,000 planned outages for work across the system.

The most impactful outages are substation or transmission line outages.
These range from a nesting bird causing trouble at a substation to a tornado causing widespread damage to transmission lines. These are called power supply outages, and they can impact more than 1,000 members at a time. In a normal year, we experience less than five power supply outages.

Other common causes of power outages include animals, trees, car accidents, dig-ins that damage underground lines, lightning and equipment failure.

Outages caused by underground cable faults have greatly reduced, thanks to our completed underground cable replacement program.

If your account information is up to date and includes your cell number, we'll send you a text alert when your power goes out. Update your account on SmartHub, polkburnett.com or 800-421-0283, ext. 335.