About 1,100 West Penn Power customers in Butler County should expect to lose power Sunday morning.

The company is upgrading some of its equipment at a substation near West Sunbury, according to spokesman Todd Meyers. The work requires part of the station being de-powered, taking down some residences with it.

The outage is scheduled to last from 8:30 a.m. to noon.

The 1,100 affected customers are distributed throughout the City of Butler, Clay Township, West Sunbury and the Slippery Rock area. Not everyone in those areas will be affected, but some customers in each are going to lose power, Meyers said.

The work is part of larger efforts to improve energy infrastructure, according to Meyers. The company will be installing remote-control capable equipment that should lessen power outages in the future for everyone who draws their power through the substation.

“Such devices allow distribution system operators to remotely isolate a problem and restore service to a portion of affected customers by transferring them to unaffected parts of the system in a matter of seconds or minutes,” Meyers said. Automated calls should have already gone out to the phone numbers on file for each of the 1,100 accounts, Meyers said.

On the other hand, Meyers pointed out that the company often doesn't have the most recent phone number on file for customers, particularly because so many have abandoned landlines in recent years. If you didn't get the first call, Meyers said, check your electric bill to see which number is on file.

Another automated call should go out before the outage.

While 1,100 customers will lose power, the equipment change actually upgrades considerably more than that number of power lines. Some are going to be switched over to different power sources during the outage, the 1,100 is just the number that can't be switched to a different supply.

This project is part of First Energy's long term infrastructure improvement plan, which is a large document of streamlined infrastructure upgrades approved by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. First Energy is West Penn Power's parent company.

The current plan spans from 2016 to 2019. When all the work is done, Meyers said, $106 million will have been spent on work such as the West Sunbury substation improvements, replaced power lines and reinforced electrical poles.