If it feels like your electric company is struggling with more storms and more frequent and longer outages, it’s more than just a feeling.

Last week, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, which regulates electric utilities across the state, released its annual service reliability assessment that showed a record number of storms in 2024 knocked out power to 2.8 million people in the state, about twice as many as the year before.

The PUC calculated there were 71 such outages last year, where at least 5% or at least 2,500 utility customers lost power. That’s the highest number since the commission started keeping track, some 30 years ago.

You could blame the trees.

Over the past decade, vegetation has been the leading cause of power outages and “this issue has increased sharply,” th

See Full Page