PSEG Long Island Is Prepared for Summer 2025

(UNIONDALE, N.Y. – June 18, 2025)  With summer arriving, PSEG Long Island is prepared for hurricane season and to meet peak demand during extreme heat situations in the coming months. The company’s ongoing electric infrastructure and storm hardening improvements help provide electric reliability to Long Island and the Rockaways throughout the year. 

PSEG Long Island has incorporated numerous enhancements and upgrades to the electric grid, its systems and its storm processes, becoming the No. 1 overhead electric service provider in New York State for reliability.  

“Providing safe, reliable electric service to approximately 1.2 million customers is a long-term commitment, and our personnel work year-round to ensure the grid is ready for summer’s extreme weather conditions. Over more than a decade, we have made numerous improvements that help us deliver consistent, resilient power to our customers, today and in the future.” 

-  Michael Sullivan, Vice president of Electric Operations, PSEG Long Island

Electric Infrastructure Improvements

Across Long Island and the Rockaways, PSEG Long Island has prepared the electric infrastructure by focusing on substation, and transmission and distribution improvements, as well as by performing circuit and equipment inspections using helicopters and infrared technology. 

PSEG Long Island’s infrastructure improvements for summer 2025 include:

• Installing a new 69 kV underground transmission circuit between Belmont and Whiteside substations and a new transformer bank at the Belmont Substation. This will provide additional electrical capacity that will serve Elmont and Floral Park residents, the growing demand at UBS Arena, the stores at Belmont Villages, and the constellation of shops and restaurants that will serve crowds enjoying the races at Belmont Park.
• Expanding the Holbrook substation to accommodate a 138 kV generation tie for the Sunrise Wind Project, which is expected to provide approximately 900 MW of generation.
• Making 138 kV bus upgrades at the Hauppauge and Elwood substations, providing improved electrical capacity to better serve residential customers in these areas and the concentrations of industrial customers around Hauppauge.
• Completing a 33 kV substation conversion at Hither Hills to improve reliability and provide additional capacity during peak demand in the East End. This upgrade completes a multi-year effort to bring all substations on the East End, most of which were constructed decades ago when electrical demand was very different, up to this more recent standard of 33 kV. The East End is a primary area in PSEG Long Island’s service area that has seen sustained load growth.
• Replacing switchgears at the Elwood and Stewart Avenue substations. These switchgears had reached the end of their service life and are being replaced with newer models designed to accommodate additional connections and meet potential future increases in electrical load growth in these areas.
• Installing or upgrading distribution feeder lines in the Elwood, Locust Grove and Woodmere areas to accommodate load growth. In Woodmere, these improvements will increase capacity to support the new load additions in the area, including new electric vehicle chargers at the Amazon warehouse and at a shopping center in the Five Towns area.
• Replacing network protector transformers at the South Shore Mall in Bay Shore, improving reliability and avoiding future service interruptions for the many stores and restaurants that operate there.

Storm Hardening Programs
Since the implementation of the FEMA-funded storm-hardening program funded in 2014, PSEG Long Island has completed storm hardening and reliability work on more than 1,000 miles of distribution mainline circuits. 

PSEG Long Island is proud to continue its storm hardening work with Power On, an initiative started in the spring of 2020 that will continue to improve reliability by strengthening distribution lines, targeting the most vulnerable circuits across Long Island and the Rockaways. Since the launch, more than 352 miles of additional distribution mainline circuits have been storm hardened with stronger poles, thicker wire and other modern equipment. 

These investments have strengthened the system so that fewer customers experience outages and, when they do occur, the duration is shorter, especially during extreme weather. Excluding catastrophic storms, from the first quarter of 2024 through the first quarter of 2025, the sections of circuits that PSEG Long Island has storm-hardened have seen a 39% reduction in damage leading to outages, compared with the rest of the distribution system.

To further protect against storm damage to the energy grid, arborists from PSEG Long Island’s Tree Trimming program work throughout the year to identify and trim tree limbs in rights of way and along easements that could potentially cause outages during or after a storm. Since 2014, PSEG Long Island removed more than 136,000 hazardous trees and/or large limbs along the distribution and transmission system and trimmed more than 29,000 miles of distribution and transmission line clearance in accordance with the industry best practice clearance standard. This standard preserves the health of the tree and directs future growth away from power lines. In addition, PSEG Long Island’s vine mitigation program identified, cut and treated more than 24,000 vine locations across Long Island and the Rockaways. 

PSEG Long Island also prepares its dedicated workforce for summer by conducting annual hurricane and tropical storm drills and employee training; by developing emergency summer operating plans; and by performing summer-peak reliability analyses to ensure there is sufficient capacity to meet electric demand on high-heat days.

To learn more about PSEG Long Island’s storm prep and restoration, visit psegliny.com/Outages/StormPrepandRestoration. 

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PSEG Long Island
PSEG Long Island operates the Long Island Power Authority’s transmission and distribution system under a long-term contract.  PSEG Long Island is a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PSEG) (NYSE:PEG), a publicly traded diversified energy company.