SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI metrics vary annually due to numerous external factors affecting utility grid reliability. This data includes national reliability averages for utilities of varying sizes. The Commission sets annual reliability goals for each utility, benchmarked against a five year average of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) reliability data. To help the Commission monitor service quality, Minnesota’s investor-owned utilities— Minnesota Power, Otter Tail Power and Xcel Energy —submit annual Safety, Reliability, and Service Quality Reports as required by law (Chapter 7826). In addition to our ongoing reliability and resiliency initiatives, OUC’s team works swiftly to address outages from storms, engage with the community and advance renewable energy sources.
As electricity use in the U.S. economy increases, so does the importance of ensuring the reliability and affordability of the electricity system, especially as the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather negatively impact energy infrastructure. Second, I will discuss the broad determinants of grid reliability, including the effects of different fuel sources and technologies in the context of an evolving energy supply mix. My testimony today will first cover the impacts of reliability issues on health and the economy in the United States. On June 1, 2023, Dr. Melissa Lott, Director of Research and Senior Research Scholar, testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on electric reliability in the United States. In addition, every utility’s ERP should include a public communications plan tailored to its needs and circumstances in case of an electric supply disruption.
Recent public policy discourse has focused on the impact of load growth on grid reliability, particularly from data centers, and some policies go as far as trying to prescribe certain types of generators in the name of meeting reliability needs. Both normalized and non-normalized results provide important insights into the impact of reliability issues on ratepayers within a given year and and over time, as well as how each utility meets its IEEE 1366 standards. This indicates that although utilities may be meeting their supply-side standard in planning, other types of vulnerabilities not accounted for — particularly on the distribution system — are driving customer outages beyond planning standards. While the MPSC focuses on metrics that exclude major event days, we think the most valuable and telling reliability metrics from our report are those that include major event days. RMI’s new Reliability Dashboard can help regulators and planners interact with and learn from existing data, and identify smart improvements that serve all customers’ needs. This approach would help ensure that spending produces measurable improvements in customer reliability metrics rather than defaulting to an overreliance on resource adequacy alone.
Utilities can strategically place reclosers to minimize the impact of faults and improve system resiliency. They attempt to https://www.davespda.com/software/utilities.htm restore power quickly after transient faults, such as a tree branch momentarily touching a line. Several strategies can enhance distribution system reliability and reduce the frequency and duration of power outages. Utilities use MAIFI to analyze the impact of momentary interruptions and implement solutions such as installing reclosers and improving fault detection technologies. These brief outages can significantly impact industrial and commercial customers who rely on uninterrupted power for their operations. MAIFI measures the frequency of short-duration interruptions, typically those lasting less than five minutes.
This reduces planners’ ability to ensure that future investments are actually addressing the most critical system needs. CAIDI tracks the average time it took electric providers to restore power to customers each year, or put differently, how long the average customer was without power when there was an outage. Different reliability investments affect these components in different ways and come with very different costs, ranging from low-cost operational and maintenance measures to capital intensive infrastructure investments. While investments can reduce customer outages when they address the specific weaknesses causing outages, this only holds if planning decisions are aligned with the actual sources of interruption. Yet public policy is currently focused on rising energy demand, which does not address distribution system needs and extreme weather risks.
Three Actions Utilities Can Take Now to Improve Customer Satisfaction and Brand Trust
The system average interruption duration (SAIDI) and frequency (SAIFI) indices describe the way users experience these outages. This includes certification, Approved/Notified Body and consultancy services. Incorporating customer interruption costs into planning, which is known as “value-based reliability planning,” leads to a much better assessment of the societal costs and benefits, Schellenberg said. But Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Southern Company, two very different types of investor owned utilities, are among the most advanced at including the cost into their planning.
The sample design uses a combination of quotas and weighting based on US census data to ensure a demographically balanced sample of each evaluated utility’s customers based on age, gender, income, race and ethnicity. Each year, Escalent conducts surveys among 75,000+ residential electric, natural gas and combination utility customers of the 142 largest US utility companies (based on residential customer counts). By acting as a trusted source of energy expertise to consumers, you can make your company more relevant in their lives and further demonstrate the value you provide. A few weeks later, three substations near Tacoma, Washington, were deliberately damaged, causing power outages for more than 14,000 Tacoma Power and Puget Sound Energy customers. To help reassure apprehensive consumers, utilities should communicate that they are, indeed, building and maintaining a resilient grid.
- Investments and incentives based solely on broad system measures may encourage utilities to focus on making good performance better instead of addressing the needs of worst-served customers at the grid edge.
- These brief outages can significantly impact industrial and commercial customers who rely on uninterrupted power for their operations.
- Standard IEEE 1366–2022 provides guidelines for defining and calculating reliability indices, helping utilities assess system performance and implement improvements.
- While we should take steps to mitigate against these impacts, our work shows that a more robust option is to also support the buildout of a diverse set of technologies that make catastrophic, cascading reliability issues an extremely low probability event.
- The February 17th, 2021, Commissioner Committee Meeting on Emerging Trends contained a presentation explaining the reliability metrics and how they are used.
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Proactive maintenance reduces the likelihood of sudden breakdowns and enhances system reliability. Regular maintenance of power lines, transformers, and substations helps prevent unexpected failures. Smart meters and automated switching devices help utilities detect faults quickly, isolate affected areas, and restore power efficiently. Cost benefit analysis may include comparison between capital investment cost vs their potential savings on cost due to outages.
- In designing a system that is fit for purpose, it is crucial to understand the different causes of power outages that customers experience to design policies that can successfully address these issues.
- In addition, every utility’s ERP should include a public communications plan tailored to its needs and circumstances in case of an electric supply disruption.
- The EIA 861S is essentially a shorter version of Form EIA-861 and does not include reliability data.
- The broader economic impact of the storms of February 2021 has been estimated at upwards of $300 billion.
- In 2019, the Commission required the investor-owned utilities to develop webpages with a short summary and overview of their electric service quality reporting information.
Gas service quality reports
The results of that inquiry, as well as Staff’s investigation in Docket U , were presented to the Commission at the regularly scheduled open meeting on January 10, 2019. SAIDI, the System Average Interruption Duration Index, describes the average length of an outage in minutes. The report must identify the total number of customer complaints about reliability and power quality made to the utility during the year, and must distinguish between complaints about sustained interruptions and power quality. For more information on transmission standards (above 69,000 volts generally) and on recent transmission projects proposed for reliability, economics, or renewable purposes please refer to California Transmission Projects and Information and to the website links listed at the end of the description of the Commission’s Reliability Program. The standards and procedures described below apply to the distribution operations (below 69,000 volts generally) of the electric investor-owned utilities (IOUs) regulated by the Commission. To check if you are required to file the EIA-861S, please review the “Required Respondents” information on the first page of the Form EIA-861S Instructions.
The same focus that has been placed on potential outages of the future needs to be placed on the experienced outages of today to ensure customers aren’t overpaying for grid investments that don’t meet https://www.nonewmoney.org/how-to-save-money-on-utilities/ their needs. Overall, clean energy deployments have supported grid reliability through day-to-day operations and numerous extreme storms. When we pull in data from the amount of deployed renewable resources in each state over the years, and connect it with this measured reliability data, we don’t see evidence that renewable resources reduce reliability. Utilities in more than half of states do not conduct comprehensive integrated system planning that includes the distribution system.
OUC Alerts
EPRI performed a transmission and distribution system reliability assessment focusing on the transmission and distribution reliability, maintenance, and project prioritization processes. Many residential customers also depend on and expect near-perfect reliability because they use electricity to run the technologies that manage their homes or support their home-based businesses. Yes, continue to focus on grid resilience and improvements. Due to more frequent extreme weather, power outages are rising across the United States.