Power Outages Caused by Foil Balloons
Image courtesy of Clean Virginia Waterways of Longwood University.
Image courtesy of Southern California Edison.
Recent Media About the Impacts of Foil Balloon Litter on Power
It’s All Fun and Games Until You Knock Out Power in a Neighborhood
Your Heart-shaped Metallic Balloon Could Cause a Mass Power Outage, Energy Companies Warn
Sources:
Witmer, V., Register, K., & McKay, L. (2017). Balloon Release Research in Virginia and Reducing
Balloon Debris through Community-Based Social Marketing. Virginia Coastal Zone Management
Program (Virginia Department of Environmental Quality).
Metallized foil balloons (incorrectly referred to as Mylar) that become entangled in power lines can cause wide-spread power outages because of their electrical conduction properties.
While there is no national collection of data on foil balloons’ impacts on power supplies, Clean Virginia Waterways gathered evidence that up to 20% of power outages are caused by balloons making contact with power lines (Witmer, Register & McKay, 2017).
Download Fact Sheet - Released Balloons Cause Power Outages (Sept 2022)
A Case Study - Power Loss Due to Foil Balloons in California
This risk to power lines instigated a law in California in 1990 that requires foil balloons to be sold with a weight attached, and that metallic ribbons not be used (Balloons Blow, 2018b). In spite of this law, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) stated that metallic balloons caused more than 300 outages in 2013, cutting service to 165,000 homes (Witmer et al., 2017). Southern California Edison reported 656 power outages caused by balloons in 2014, and in 2016, metallic balloons caused 429 power outages within PG&E’s service area, cutting power to 200,000 homes and businesses (Witmer et al., 2017; Woolfolk, 2018). In 2018, two power outages caused by foil balloons made the news: 3,600 residents in San Jose, California lost power when foil balloons floated into power lines causing them to short circuit, and on January 7, 2018, power outages impacted 3,000 customers in Mid-City New Orleans, Louisiana when a foil balloon hit a power line (Cunningham, 2018).
In 2018 alone, 1,128 balloon-related explosions and power outages occurred in the SoCal region, SoCalEdison said. That number has steadily gone up over the last five years, dethroning the record high of 1,094 outages in 2017. Out of the explosions last year, 133 of those times resulted in power lines being knocked down, which poses a dangerous threat to anyone near it as the ground may become energized. (NBCLosAngeles, May 21, 2019)
