{"id":315221,"date":"2026-10-27T10:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/315221\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T10:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:42:08","slug":"why-is-generator-demand-booming-across-pittsburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/315221\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is generator demand booming across Pittsburgh?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The lights were out. Destenie Nock<\/a> stepped outside her house and heard a rumble down her street.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen as you\u2019re outside looking at the neighborhood, you just hear all these generators going and you\u2019re like wait a second they\u2019re good and I\u2019m not good and there is in theory another option,\u201d Nock said. \u201cYou\u2019re just like maybe I should invest in one of those.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nock is among a growing number of Pittsburgh residents contemplating purchasing a generator, a machine that provides a back-up power supply. After a September outage, Nock spent hundreds of dollars to replace spoiled groceries and her fridge, which was damaged by a power surge when the lights came back on.<\/p>\n

\"<\/p>\n

A permanent standby generator, which typically requires professional installation.<\/p>\n

Extreme weather is increasingly testing power reliability in Pittsburgh. According to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission<\/a>, the number of reportable outages in the commonwealth in 2025 decreased, but 52 of 55 outages that year were weather-related \u2013 showing the increasing threat a changing climate poses to reliable power. And about 1.7 million customers were affected by what is considered a major event \u2013 up from approximately 696,000 in 2024.<\/p>\n

Outages are lasting longer, too. The Duquesne\u00a0Light SAIDI Index<\/a> found a decade ago utility customers in the Pittsburgh region were seeing an average interruption of about an hour (70 minutes) per year. In 2024, those power outages jumped to about 3 hours per year.<\/p>\n

For some, like Nock, she lost power for hours and couldn’t go to a relative’s nearby, which was also in the dark. She weighed whether investing in an on-site power supply could have prevented costly consequences.<\/p>\n

On individuals or utilities to find a solution?<\/p>\n

The September outage, Nock’s second of the year, hit home: Nock is the Alex Hills Career Development Associate Professor of Engineering and Public Policy, and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She thinks a lot about the concept of resilience: Whether it\u2019s on people or utilities to adapt when conditions change energy demand.<\/p>\n

The answer may be a bit of both, according to University of Pittsburgh associate professor and Director of the Electric Power Technologies Laboratory Brandon Grainger.
He says Pittsburgh\u2019s utilities are pretty quick to get the lights back on, but work is ongoing to replace aging infrastructure and improve predictions for grid load. And Pittsburgh\u2019s topography is uniquely suited to outages, he said, with power lines above ground and heavy tree cover.<\/p>\n

“We can\u2019t predict when trees are gonna fall or when ice builds on transmission lines and things, those are going to detriment the electric system and so that’s why you have to have back up resources in place,” Grainger said. “It makes some sense to buy a back up generator because people want to have their electricity on 100% of the time.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A power outage on Destenie Nock’s Greenfield street in March 2026.<\/p>\n

Generator demand is booming<\/p>\n

Generators aren\u2019t one-size-fits-all. Some are portable machines you can buy for a few hundred dollars and run on gas or solar.<\/p>\n

Others, like the one you heard at the start of this story, can cost up to $15,000 and require installation by professionals like RC Watt, whose company sets up generators around the Pittsburgh region. He says demand is booming.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to staff up and add more people,\u201d Watt said. \u201cBut if someone calls me in November and says \u2018I want a generator before Christmas,\u2019 that\u2019s not going to happen \u2026 The industry is seeing double-digit growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Grainger says utilities will have to take what they\u2019ve learned from previous winters to prepare for energy demand in the future \u2013 regardless of generators increasing role.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try to have forecasting methods to say hey this is how much load is gonna be in Pittsburgh at this given time,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to come up with better predictive routines to forecast these issues so we don\u2019t have these disturbances you\u2019ve seen over the last couple years.”<\/p>\n

For people weighing the investment, Grainger says it\u2019s up to how you essentially use power.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s human nature to always want electricity available, 100% of the time, but no engineered system is perfect,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Nock still might buy a generator. She remembers the pain she felt when she lost her daughter\u2019s milk and couldn\u2019t play a sound machine to help her child sleep.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow resilient do I have to be until I can just use my fridge? That\u2019s the question,\u201d she said. I think we need to start considering reliability to be, \u2018I can use all the energy I need in my home to meet my basic needs without inducing financial stress.\u2019”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The lights were out. Destenie Nock stepped outside her house and heard a rumble down her street. \u201cThen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":["post-315221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}