January 16, 2023

Aging Infrastructure: Airport Power Delivery Networks at Risk

Over the last 5 years no less than a dozen airports have suffered power-delivery outages that affected flight operations. Most notable and severe among these was the December 17, 2017 outage at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport which resulted in an-hour outage that cost Delta Airlines over $50 million dollars in lost revenues and attendant expenses. (Read the case study) The failures at Atlanta and Austin share a common root-cause: failure of aging equipment and infrastructure like cable splices and vacuum switchgear. Frustratingly, these outages were avoidable with the right utility support stack. We know because we helped Georgia Power get back on track after the Atlanta outage. In this post, we’ll go over how other airports can use Georgia Power’s installation as a blueprint for avoiding failure and downtime.