18 Apr
2025
Energeks
When services shut down and networks are overloaded with wishes and light – reliable power is what decides who enjoys peace and who... searches for a flashlight.
This article is for everyone responsible for energy infrastructure: grid operators, industrial plant owners, critical facility managers, farmers, and PV investors. By the end, you’ll discover specific solutions that work even when everyone else is on holiday.
What you’ll find in this article:
Why the holiday season is a real test for infrastructure
What risks come with limited service availability
The most common springtime failure scenarios
What can be done in advance (and what Energeks is already doing)
3 specific solutions that never fail
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Power infrastructure protection during holidays: why Easter is a real test for the grid
Spring, bunnies, and... power loss?
Easter isn’t just about mazurek cakes, painted eggs, and quiet Sunday dinners interrupted only by the sound of cutlery. For energy infrastructure, it’s a time full of surprises – and we’re not talking about the ones hidden in the grass. Because it’s exactly when everything slows down that things start happening – things engineers record in reports as “seasonal failure, occurred despite standard operation.”
Holidays are beautiful, but the grid doesn’t understand that. The grid doesn’t take a break. It runs non-stop, which means every deviation from routine – whether it’s reduced consumption or sudden process shutdowns – can come back to bite. Why? Because, contrary to appearances, it’s not intensity that puts the most strain on the system. It’s sudden changes, interruptions, and a lack of response to anomalies.
Easter “slow energy” doesn’t mean fewer problems
At first glance: holidays = fewer people = lower consumption. That might mean reduced load on the system, right? In theory, yes. But practice has other ideas. The Easter slowdown in production, transport, and trade causes disturbances in the power balance.
When entire production lines shut down, the reactive power demand shifts. Unsteady states emerge – ones even the most diligent switchgear designers might not have accounted for. A transformer that’s been running smoothly all year suddenly starts to hiss, heat up, or simply misbehave. Same goes for PV inverters – with no load on the network to receive the energy, they act like spoiled children: either refusing to cooperate or throwing errors.
Easter voltage surges? The grid hates surprises
Most holiday-related failures aren’t caused by spectacular events – no sparks, no bangs, no smoke. Often, it all starts with one seemingly innocent parameter: phase voltage.
During holidays, voltage surges are easy to trigger – for instance, when the owner of a large warehouse suddenly turns off ventilation, cooling, and lighting, while a neighboring PV farm is generating 100% output under full sun. This imbalance can push the voltage up by 8–10%. A transformer may tolerate that – once. Maybe even twice. But on the third time? It might trip. And that’s when a blackout begins.
Silence on the line – no response to symptoms
The biggest problem during Easter? Silence. Silence on the airwaves. Technical services operating with limited staff. Dispatchers on call – but only for critical issues. Alarm systems running, supposedly – but is anyone reading them?
Here’s how it looks in practice:
Somewhere in the system, voltage imbalance starts creeping in.
The SCADA system sends an alert: "Voltage exceeded 245 V."
No one reacts – “it’s probably temporary.”
After 4 hours, the inverter shuts down.
After 6 hours, the UPS switches to emergency mode.
After 10 hours… there’s no one to reset the system.
And suddenly, Easter is spent not at the table, but on the phone with a technician from the other side of the country.
Holidays don’t forgive design flaws
On a regular weekday, every minor issue can be spotted and fixed quickly. But during holidays? No one’s showing up instantly. Sometimes, no one picks up the phone. That’s when you realize:
Lack of redundancy isn’t just a design oversight – it’s the reason for total failure.
Unconnected monitoring becomes a serious lapse.
Lack of anti-condensation heating in the substation makes all the difference during a chilly April morning.
Easter mornings are beautiful. But only when your transformer isn’t sitting in the fog, your switchgear isn’t sounding alarms, and your energy storage batteries aren’t entering protection mode.
When only what was properly planned keeps working
The best-prepared facilities are those that treat Easter as a general test. They adjust schedules for the holiday shift. They have redundant power sources. Their automatic transfer switches (ATS) operate within milliseconds. Their energy storage systems maintain voltage not for an hour, but for an entire day.
At Energeks, we don’t see holidays as a threat. We see them as a benchmark for infrastructure quality. Because if something survives Easter, it’ll likely survive anything.
You don’t need a storm to take down the grid. Sometimes, all it takes is... holiday peace. And in that peace hides the most risks – hidden, ignored, overlooked. If we treat power infrastructure protection during holidays as a priority – we don’t just avoid trouble. We build trust in technology. And that, paradoxically, might be the best Easter gift we can give ourselves.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays: what happens when service is offline
When technical support switches to holiday mode
Picture this: Easter Sunday. Someone’s just putting the last mazurek in the oven, kids are running around the garden with baskets, and in an office building across the country... a red light appears on the control panel.
"Voltage fault. Warning: inverter overheating."
Operator? On vacation.
Service? Phone standby – answers only after the fourth call.
Technicians? “Next available date: Tuesday after the holidays.” That’s four days later.
Sounds dramatic? This is a real-life scenario – and it happened in a medical infrastructure sector. It wasn’t a lack of professionalism. It was... a lack of operational availability, which is baked into the nature of holidays.
The Easter domino effect
When one part of the system stops working – say, a transformer or reactive power compensator – it doesn’t always lead to an immediate outage. Sometimes it’s just a “grind.” But a grind at a time when no one’s around to notice. And that’s the core of the issue.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays isn’t about making sure everything works perfectly. It’s about having a plan for when it doesn’t.
Because when there’s no plan:
a minor fault escalates into a breakdown,
a small alert turns into a full-blown alarm,
a seemingly trivial overload leads to a shutdown.
It’s like baking a cake – all it takes is for it to spill over in the oven, and suddenly... it’s game over.
Offline service – what really happens during long weekends
Easter always falls on a Sunday and Monday – both public holidays. But in reality, most companies begin winding down on Good Friday. And they come back... on Tuesday.
That means:
at least 72 hours of limited incident response,
no access to full service teams (especially for smaller clients),
postponed inspections until the following week.
What’s more – many SCADA systems and protective setups work great, but... only when someone’s on the other end. When no one is there to interpret the data, the decision becomes: “Let’s wait.”
And that’s the issue. Because infrastructure doesn’t wait.
Can nothing really be done?
The question pops up every year: “Surely you can’t have full 24/7 service over the holidays, right?”
Partially – true. But there’s a difference between “we can’t have a technician on-site” and “we can’t prevent escalation.”
A lot depends on:
the architecture of your power system (is it modular?),
automation level (do you have ATS, redundancy, remote access?),
integration with alarms and SCADA,
your backup and maintenance policies.
A company that thinks ahead of Easter doesn’t need “a guy with a toolbelt” on standby. It just needs confirmation: “The system is responding as expected.”
And that’s the approach Energeks promotes.
And what if something still goes wrong?
Because it will. Even in the best-designed systems, things happen. A surge. An inverter failure. Someone accidentally disconnects a cable.
So what then?
This is where protection engineering steps in. Not the textbook kind – the real-world kind. The Easter kind. The kind that works on a Sunday night when no one’s watching. We’re talking about:
automatic reconfiguration of power supply,
prioritization algorithms for loads,
transformer self-diagnostics,
conditional alarms (if X and Y, then notify Z).
A well-calibrated system won’t prevent every failure, but it will spot it, contain it, and ride it out. Until Tuesday.
How does it work for Energeks clients?
Many of our partners have gone through this journey: from manual oversight to partial automation to fully remote-controlled systems.
Case 1: Industrial facility – Mazovia
In 2023, a voltage converter failure occurred at 4:30 a.m. on Easter Sunday. Under normal conditions – 6 to 8 hours of downtime. But the Energeks automation system switched power sources, activated backup, and sent an SMS alert to the on-call technician.
Total recovery time: 16 minutes.
Case 2: PV farm – Lubusz Voivodeship
Excessive voltage in the grid on Easter Monday threatened to damage inverters. The system installed by Energeks responded by temporarily limiting output to maintain stability. Within a few hours, conditions normalized – no human intervention needed.
Holidays are always a test
Let’s not believe in “it won’t break.”
Correction – it will.
And usually when you’re on your way to Easter brunch, not sitting with your laptop in the server room.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays isn’t overkill. It’s a baseline stress test for your systems.
Because if your installation survives Easter without a hiccup, you can move forward confidently.
And if it doesn’t? Better to find out now than mid-production season.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays: the most common spring failure scenarios
Spring is blooming… but the grid is falling apart?
The first rays of sunshine, storks on the poles, warmth on your face, and the smell of freshly cut grass – everything suggests that things will be fine. But not for your transformer. For it, spring is like a surprise audit in a warehouse full of unresolved issues.
Everything that survived the winter on a handshake finally gives up.
And if the holiday weekend just happens to coincide with disabled monitoring and half-staffed duty teams… well, that’s when you really need to start praying.
Scenario 1: The springtime “moisture mishap”
The snow has melted, the rains have passed – but the moisture lingers. It gathers in the strangest places. Most often in MV switchgears that kept it together all winter… until Easter. That’s when they show their second face.
It starts out harmless:
temperature sensors report subtle drops,
the compensation system starts to “drift,”
signals begin to go out of sync.
In practice? A short circuit occurs at the interface between differential protection and current transformers. The switchgear disconnects. And suddenly, an entire facility that “just wanted to pause production for the holidays” is left without power for 48 hours.
This isn’t fiction. It has happened. More than once.
Scenario 2: PV plays an April Fool’s joke
Oh, how wonderful! Sun at last! Our PV panels are producing energy like they’ve got something to prove.
During the holidays, when energy usage drops to nearly zero and solar radiation surges, PV installations behave like unleashed puppies.
If your inverters and power-limiting systems aren’t well-calibrated, you can be sure that:
grid voltage will start climbing (sometimes by 10–12% above nominal),
overvoltage protection will trigger and... disconnect the inverter,
some backup systems will lose synchronization.
All while no one is watching. No one notices that your PV investment has quietly gone offline. Until Tuesday. And then you ask, “Why didn’t we produce anything when the sun was shining?”
And no one answers.
Scenario 3: An overloaded transformer after morning coffee
It’s a classic. Easter Monday. Someone turns on the cake mixer, the kettle, the dishwasher, the vacuum, and the sprinkler system – all at once. On a national scale: millions of micro-consumers activating simultaneously. And if you own a small transformer station on an estate, a PV farm, or an agricultural site – that moment might be your undoing.
A transformer that’s been “resting” for two days suddenly gets a full-power jolt.
If you don’t have a soft-start system or surge limiter – insulation might fail, and parasitic voltages could overheat the windings. No smoke. No bang.
But later, you’ll wonder why your protection devices tripped and why the UPS isn’t recharging.
Scenario 4: A cable loses contact with reality
Spring also means... earthworks. Everyone wants to dig something, improve something, replant something.
And if an MV cable runs under the very path getting new paving stones – brace yourself.
Easter is prime time for “spontaneous” landscaping efforts that end with:
frayed insulation,
disrupted phase geometry,
or simply... a severed cable.
It doesn’t take much. Just one shovel in the wrong place.
And if your monitoring is active but no one is tracking it during the holidays, the issue will only come to light when you return to the office and see 300 alerts from SCADA. All dated Saturday.
Scenario 5: Automation that overslept
The trickiest scenario is the one no one expects. A backup power system with an automatic transfer switch (ATS) that should kick in during a voltage drop... simply doesn’t.
Why?
outdated firmware,
test mode accidentally left on,
someone tested an alternate setting a month ago and forgot to switch it back.
The result? When grid power fails, the system doesn’t switch to backup.
There’s no mechanical failure. Just a human missing from the update loop.
And since it’s Easter – no one notices for four days.
Takeaways? These aren’t theoretical
Every one of these examples happened in real life – in Poland, in recent years – often at facilities that seemed well-prepared. It’s not about lacking expertise. It’s about seasonality, human error, and routine disruption.
That’s why holidays are the best exam for systems designed to work autonomously.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays means:
designing with a margin for imperfection,
integrating monitoring with automatic response,
minimizing the need for human intervention,
conducting dry-run tests – before the first Easter candle is lit.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays: what can be done in advance (and what Energeks is already doing)
Don’t wait for something to break – holidays don’t forgive
Easter doesn’t sneak up on you. The calendar gives weeks of warning. But do we prepare our infrastructure with that same foresight? Most often – no. As long as it’s working, we don’t touch it.
Why stress about it in advance?
And that, right there, is the core of the issue. Prevention isn’t about panic. It’s about the calm that comes from earlier decisions. And if there’s one lesson to be drawn from Energeks’ experience, it’s this: it’s always better to act early than to be searching for the cause of a failure at 10:30 p.m. on Easter Monday, headlamp on.
Step 1: Easter energy audit – no yolk
Let’s start with something simple. Check your infrastructure the same way you do spring cleaning:
Do your overcurrent protections have the correct settings?
Are contactors, relays, and terminal strips free of corrosion or looseness?
Have your automatic transfer switches (ATS) undergone failover testing in the past 6 months?
Do you have access to all power schematics – even remotely?
These questions aren’t nitpicking. They’re a technical confession for Easter – and Energeks handles them with finesse. As part of our seasonal audit services, we assess transformer stations, MV switchgear, and energy storage systems – using both real-time monitoring and field inspection data.
Step 2: Update your control systems and SCADA
Nothing’s worse than an alarm system sending alerts... to a former employee. Or a SCADA panel that logs errors, but only locally – with no remote access.
Before Easter, double-check:
Is remote access working?
Are the passwords current (and known to the right people)?
Are automatic responses (like reset or failover switching) active and correctly configured?
Energeks has deployed SCADA setups that, during the holidays, not only generate alerts but also send SMS, email, and take local action – well before anyone answers the phone.
Step 3: Assess your transformer – even if it “sounds fine”
Don’t judge a book by its cover – or a transformer by its lack of humming. Especially not before the holidays. These devices don’t say “I’m struggling.”
They run – until they don’t.
Things to check:
Draw an oil sample and run a DGA (dissolved gas analysis),
Measure hot-spot temperature under peak load,
Have someone who knows what they’re listening for assess the paper-oil insulation.
Energeks offers rapid transformer checkups tailored to spring risks, including mobile winding resistance tests, insulation checks, and CT diagnostics.
Step 4: Review your load schedule and PV curves
If you’ve got a PV installation, April is already a peak month. That means:
daytime voltages can exceed safe limits,
inverters may disconnect erratically,
overvoltage thresholds can trigger production losses.
It’s smart to simulate hourly PV output for the Easter weekend – factoring in the reduced power draw from loads. Ask yourself: can your grid, which usually handles production well, cope with a holiday state of “too much energy and no one to use it”?
If not – Energeks has the answer: dynamic power limiters, integrated energy storage, and automatic load direction switching.
Step 5: Create an Easter checklist for your infrastructure
It can be a simple A4 sheet or an online spreadsheet – but a solid one. Sample points:
Is your alarm system operating remotely?
Has your transformer been checked in the past 3 months?
ATS tested?
Inverters running updated firmware?
Do duty staff know who to call for service?
Is documentation accessible online?
At Energeks, we build these checklists in collaboration with the client, tailored to the site’s specifics. For one it’s a food warehouse, for another an EV station, and for someone else – a poultry farm, where every minute without ventilation is a catastrophe.
Step 6: Anticipate, before the indicator light goes out
The most important thing you can do in advance? Build awareness that infrastructure doesn’t observe holidays.
If everything’s working – great.
But does it still work when:
there’s no internet?
no primary power?
no one picks up the phone?
Power infrastructure protection during holidays starts in… March. Or even February. But never on Saturday at 10:30 p.m. when the first fault hits. That’s why Energeks acts preventively – and encourages its clients to do the same.
Peace of mind is an engineering achievement
You can have peace of mind – but only when everything’s been checked, tested, and automated beforehand.
Easter isn’t the time for emergency drills. It’s the time to be with your family, not your reset button.
Energeks is already working today to ensure your holiday peace. We help predict, test, and optimize.
Because a calm Easter isn’t heaven-sent – it’s engineered.
Power infrastructure protection during holidays: three proven technologies that never fail
What do you really want this Easter?
Notifications turned off. Warm borscht. And zero phone calls saying, “Boss, I think something’s going on at the substation.”
That’s why, instead of investing in metaphorical peace of mind, it’s better to invest in its engineering equivalent – a system that runs on its own.
Below are three technologies we’ve tested in real conditions, on real failures, in truly imperfect circumstances. And most importantly – each of them was designed precisely for moments like Easter.
Solution 1: Automated transformer stations with ATS functionality
On paper, everything looks fine. Transformer. Power. Backup line.
But as hundreds of outages have shown – having backup power isn’t enough. You also need a mechanism that triggers it when the operator is at the dinner table, not in the control room.
In practice, this means:
a system that switches power sources in real time (under 200 ms),
local decision-making logic (if phase Y voltage drops below threshold X, trigger source B),
full event history available remotely (via app, browser, or SCADA).
Energeks’ ATS technologies are:
compact (fit into a standard container substation),
lab and field tested,
human-error resistant (work without operator confirmation).
At one production plant in Easter 2023, the ATS system activated three times: once due to transformer failure, once after a voltage drop, and once due to operator error. In none of these cases was intervention required. Easter saved.
Solution 2: Energy storage systems with dynamic priority logic
Not every problem can be solved by switching sources. Sometimes the issue is too much energy, other times it’s a shortage – but just for a moment. And sometimes it’s both… within 10 minutes. Classic Easter.
That’s why energy storage today is more than a battery. It’s an intelligent buffer between reality and design – between what was planned and what’s actually happening.
Energeks’ solutions include:
dynamic control of charging and discharging power,
intelligent allocation of resources (which loads get priority?),
integration with weather forecast systems (for PV and EV),
physical resilience to weather conditions (fog, frost, dust).
Why does it work on holidays?
Because it doesn’t need to be turned on. It runs on its own.
Because it doesn’t require supervision. It’s algorithm-driven.
Because you don’t need to wake anyone on Sunday. It works better than a human.
Typical scenario: On Easter Monday, a poultry farm in Lesser Poland had no grid power. The energy storage system maintained voltage for 7 hours, discharging intelligently – skipping non-critical loads.
No chicks were harmed.
Solution 3: MV switchgear with full monitoring and self-diagnostics
Sounds boring? Fine. But a boring switchgear that works during the holidays is the best gift imaginable. No drama. No surprises. No 2 a.m. texts.
Energeks’ MV systems (IP54/IP65, indoor/outdoor) are equipped with:
humidity and temperature sensors with local alarm logic,
anti-condensation heating (operates down to -15°C),
status signaling on the busbar level,
remote parameter access via portal or app (with VPN or TLS encryption).
Most Easter-time errors aren’t caused by “no power.” They’re caused by subtle factors: moisture, potential differences, micro-shorts. That’s where self-diagnostics shine.
Case study: In an EV charging station (Lower Silesia), on Easter Sunday 2024, the Energeks switchgear reported humidity above safety threshold.
The system automatically activated heaters and disconnected a low-priority load.
Normal operation resumed – with no human involved.
Drivers noticed nothing. Which is exactly how it should be.
Why these three?
Because:
they work without human input,
they react faster than the on-call phone,
they are scalable – from small setups to large-scale installations.
But most importantly: they don’t just work on holidays.
They simply reveal their strength when it matters most.
Don’t ask if it works. Ask if it survives Easter 2025
Easter is a stress test. For ovens, for drivers returning from family visits, and – most of all – for power systems.
It’s a time when the prepared are always powered.
Energeks knows that technology should serve people – especially when those people are at the table with their loved ones, not crawling into switchgear with a flashlight.
That’s why our solutions:
don’t rest,
don’t ask for permission,
don’t fail.
If you want your infrastructure to make it through the holidays intact – design it for the worst day of the year.
Because then, the rest of the year will only get easier.
Explore our full offer of Energeks solutions, including transformer stations, MV switchgear, power compensation and energy storage – all available in tailor-made configurations.
Need something ready right away? Visit our webshop with preconfigured units.
And if you want to join a community that knows engineering isn’t just a job, it’s a responsibility – connect with us on LinkedIn.
Wishing you a peaceful, safe, and truly joyful Easter from the entire Energeks team.
May the technology be with you. And the power – always available.
Sources:
Reviews
No reviews!
❮
❯