(TNS) — If it feels like electric company is struggling with more storms and more frequent and longer outages, it’s more than just a feeling.

Last week, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, which regulates electric utilities across the state, released its annual service reliability assessment that showed a record number of storms in 2024 knocked out power to 2.8 million people in the state, about twice as many as the year before.

The PUC calculated there were 71 such outages last year, where at least 5% or at least 2,500 utility customers lost power. That’s the highest number since the commission started keeping track, some 30 years ago.

You could blame the trees.

Over the past decade, vegetation has been the leading cause of power outages and “this issue has increased sharply,” the PUC’s report said.

“Hopefully, 2024 was an aberration in terms of the number of outage events due to storms and will moderate in 2025,” it said.

So far, 2025 has been no slacker in that department, as residents of southwestern Pennsylvania might remember from the late April storm that cut the lights to more than 400,000 customers, including more than 40% of Duquesne Light’s customer base, keeping some in the dark for as long as two weeks.

That storm and major events like it — which impact more than 10% of a company’s customers — are typically excluded from how Pennsylvania utilities are assessed on their reliability metrics. Even without them, utilities across the state are struggling to meet their reliability benchmarks.

North Side-based Duquesne Light has consistently ranked at or near the top of Pennsylvania utilities in terms of minimizing the number of outages and restoring service quickly, although the latter measure is ticking up for Duquesne and others.

One reason for that is companies are using technology to isolate problems that in earlier days would keep more people offline. The result, though, is that the fewer customers who do end up having a power interruption typically wait longer for it to be reconnected, in part because those outrages can be more isolated and therefore take longer for crews to address.

Last year, Duquesne Light customers who lost power waited an average of two hours and 40 minutes until it was restored. By comparison, customers of the region’s other large utility, West Penn Power, waited about 3 hours and 20 minutes for electricity to come back on after an outage. Neither company met its benchmarks for restoration time last year.

Duquesne Light did keep the number of customers impacted by an outage under its performance target, while West Penn eluded its goal.

The PUC noted that in recent years, the utilities that have invested the most in their long-term infrastructure investment plans — Duquesne Light, PECO and PPL — also have had the best reliability metrics.

But “trees, and especially [off right of way] trees, continue to be a chronic problem for Duquesne, as well as every [electric utility] in Pennsylvania,” the report states.

This year, Duquesne Light plans to spend nearly $30 million cutting and trimming trees along and near its rights of way.

West Penn Power’s parent, FirstEnergy Pennsylvania, projects an annual budget of $100 million for vegetation management for its four utilities in the state.

Understanding that weather was behind all of the big outages last year “is not to excuse a slip in reliability performance,” the PUC warned. In fact, it’s more a call to arms for utilities to invest more in their resilience efforts.

The agency recommended looking at covers for overhead lines and even burying some underground to protect them from the increasing number and severity of storms that are expected over the coming years.

Utilities recover the cost of such projects from customers, but they have to justify their efficacy before the PUC, which approves rates.

The agency wrote in its report that utilities should consider not just the cost of the capital expense but also the cost to society of an extended outage.