In the Remington neighborhood of Baltimore City, something quietly powerful is happening —literally. While the morning hum of city life carries on, BGE underground crews are installing a Motor Operated Switch (MOS) on a residential distribution switchgear. It’s not flashy, but it’s a game-changer.
Picture this: a storm rolls through causing outages for some of our customers. In the past, restoring service meant dispatching a service operator to the site to manually flip a switch—rain, wind, traffic and all. It could take 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the conditions. Now? With the MOS in place, we can restore service remotely, within minutes, with just a few clicks from our operations center.
Customers benefit because they’re going to have a smaller outage and a shorter duration of the outage if an event does occur.
It’s like upgrading from a flip phone to a smartphone—same function, but smarter, faster, and far more efficient.
This isn’t just about convenience, it’s about reliability. The MOS is part of a broader strategy that includes distribution reclosers and our Automated Restoration Scheme (ARS). These innovative technologies work together to isolate outages and restore power automatically, often reducing the number of affected customers from thousands to just a few dozen.
For the people living in Remington, this means shorter outages and faster recoveries. For us at BGE, it means being proactive—anticipating problems before they escalate and using smart tools to keep the grid resilient.
It’s easy to overlook the quiet upgrades happening behind the scenes. But every switch we install, every piece of equipment we modernize, is a step toward a more reliable future. And while most people won’t see the work happening underground, they’ll feel the difference when the lights stay on—even when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
