FPL and SDG&E Win Awards for Outstanding Reliability
PA Consulting recognized Florida Power & Light (FPL) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) as co-recipients of the global consultancy’s National Reliability Award. The prestigious award is presented to “the utility that showcases a focus on customer service, technology deployment, operational successes, and data and analytics.” It’s only the second time in the award’s 21-year history that there has been a tie at the top. Last year, FPL won the award outright.
“We were pleasantly surprised to once again have a tie for the National Reliability Award. Both Florida Power & Light [Figure 1] and San Diego Gas & Electric are top performers who are consistently driving efficient customer restoration efforts. While all our ReliabilityOne recipients demonstrate these traits, these two utilities stood out this year thanks to their collaboration on industry leading machine learning analytics, which will provide a new approach to asset performance management,” PA Consulting’s ReliabilityOne Program Director Gregg Edeson said in an email to POWER.
PA Consulting said it analyzes the nation’s electric utility industry “using publicly available information on the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), which provides the average outage duration per customer, and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), which measures the average number of interruptions per customer.” The indices showed a very slight decrease compared to the previous year in investor-owned utility average system outage duration by a half minute in 2020 to 122 minutes.
PA Consulting said both FPL and SDG&E (Figure 2) “excelled across outage restoration practices, real time situational awareness, sophisticated fault locating technology, comprehensive data capture, security review and analytics, proactive customer outreach programs, and innovative customer self-serve options.” Six more power companies were also recognized for their outstanding reliability efforts during the awards ceremony, which was held at Skybox in San Diego on Nov. 17.
Regional ReliabilityOne Awards recipients were:
- West region (Metropolitan) — SDG&E
- Mid-Atlantic region (Metropolitan) — Public Service Electric and Gas Co.
- Northeast region (Metropolitan) — Consolidated Edison Company of New York
- Northeast region (Suburban and Rural) — National Grid Upstate New York
- Southeast region (Metropolitan) — FPL
- Southeast region (Suburban and Rural) — Gulf Power
PA Consulting also presented awards for specific areas of outstanding performance. Those were given to:
- Public Power — Austin Energy
- Most Improved — Wisconsin Public Service
- Outstanding Customer Engagement — Wisconsin Public Service
- Outstanding Technology and Innovation — FPL
- Outstanding System Resiliency — FPL
- Outstanding Grid Sustainability — SDG&E
- Outstanding Community Safety — Consolidated Edison Company of New York
“We are extremely proud to work with the top utilities in America. The data shows that ReliabilityOne program participants, on average, experienced 44% fewer sustained outages, and outages were 55% shorter than the average U.S. investor-owned utility, proving that participation in the program can lead to tangible benefits to consumers and stakeholders. Congratulations again to all of the utilities who won an award this year,” said Edeson.
—Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor (@AaronL_Power, @POWERmagazine).