June 16, 2015 – IEEE says it has updated standard IEEE 1264 – the Guide for Animal Deterrents for Electric Power Supply Substations. To address reliability and safety, and minimize associated revenue loss, this guide provides methods and designs to mitigate interruptions, equipment damage and personnel safety issues resulting from animal intrusions into electric power supply substations.

“Providing consistent, reliable power is a complex and vital task for engineers. Even something as simple as animals interfering with our power equipment could mean big problems, causing outages for whole cities and towns,” said John Randolph, IEEE 1264 working group chair. “Therefore, the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) has established IEEE 1264 to help prevent these kinds of outages by providing guidelines on animal deterrents at power supply substations. It’s this kind of standard that helps keep the lights on.”

Although the animal problems differ in nature geographically, most electric utilities have experienced the problem of animal intrusion into electric supply substations resulting in equipment damage, interruption of or loss of service to customers, and safety problems for operating personnel. The costs associated with these outages continue to escalate, IEEE said.

This revised standard identifies various animals, the problems their behaviors cause, and mitigation methods. In addition, the standard provides criteria for applying mitigation methods, documents to support the various methods effectiveness, and recommendations for evaluating effectiveness after the method is applied.

The IEEE 1264 standard is now available for purchase at the IEEE Standards Store.