Working to keep the power line rights of way clear, PPL is in its third and final year of an initial clearing of vegetation.
The effort, called Wire Zone-Border Zone, was prompted by strict new federal reliability requirements.
Paul Wirth, spokesman for PPL, said Wednesday that the main idea behind the three-year effort is to remove trees beneath high-voltage transmission lines.
"We're doing this under all our lines to prevent future problems around our 29-county area," Wirth said. "We have 89,000 electric customers in Schuylkill County, so we really have an obligation to keep the service as reliable for these customers."
While PPL has right-of-way to remove these trees, the program is a more aggressive approach in order to keep the power grid reliable.
According to the PPL website, sheds, swimming pools, tall fences, billboards, decks, buildings, playground equipment and any other object, structure or tree that could pose a safety or reliability problem are prohibited from being in the high-voltage power line rights of way.
Wirth said that there are about 100 miles of high voltage transmission lines in Schuylkill County and PPL expects to be finished clearing the vegetation under them in a month.
"Our power lines come in different voltages, so the ones from the power plant to the region are the ones that we will be complete with," Wirth said. "The goal is to keep trees away from all of these voltage lines."
With the new federal standards needed to be met, Wirth said that PPL decided to become more aggressive with tree clearing in order to meet the standards because downed trees can not only lead to a local power outage but also a regional blackout.
He said that the 2003 northeast blackout led to 50 million people without power all because a tree touched a power line in Ohio and the outage spread to New York City.
While PPL only removed the vegetation from the highest voltage power lines, according to Wirth, workers will continue clearing trees from other voltage lines even after the aggressive three-year program is complete.
"While it's not always popular to remove these trees with the landowners, it's the best thing to do to make sure everybody's power is reliable," Wirth said.
For more information, visit www.pplelectric.com/obstructions.