Last year marked the eighth consecutive year that at least one of Ohio’s regulated utilities failed to meet one or both of the company-specific reliability standards set by the Ohio Public Utilities Commission.
Companies that provide services to most of Ohio’s ratepayers also missed any targets last year.
The track record of these utilities suggests that consumers are not getting full bang for their buck, even though they charge multi-million-dollar passenger fees ostensibly for network improvements, vegetation management and other work.
“AEP Ohio is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in its distribution to improve reliability,” said company spokesman Scott Blake, commenting on the company’s slightly more stringent PUCO standards starting in 2019 compared to those in 2013. “These investments benefit from more stringent performance standards are more achievable.”
However, last year, AEP Ohio failed to meet its standard for the time it takes to restore power for outages affecting customers.
All Ohio utilities reduced their outage frequency per customer last year compared to 2021 and 2022. However, Duke Energy Ohio still did not meet this standard. AEP in Ohio and FirstEnergy Cleveland Electric Lighting Company AND Edison’s Toledo meanwhile, they failed to meet targets for the time it took to restore power to customers after outages.
Prolonged downtime can lead to food spoilage, loss of heating and air conditioning, business interruption, inability to employ energy to power electronic devices, and more. These problems, in turn, can threaten people’s physical or financial well-being. Additionally, ongoing climate change poses ongoing challenges to the reliability and resilience of the power grid.
“Regulators are obviously interested in utilities’ performance in delivering safe and reliable energy,” said Matt Schilling, spokesman for the Ohio Public Utilities Commission.
To this end, the agency pursues a goal two company-specific reliability standards for each utility company, using metrics commonly used in the electrical industry. Each spring, utilities must submit reports showing their performance on specific metrics over the previous year.
One standard refers to the average duration of power outages for customers who experience them, measured in minutes. This is called the Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI). The second is the average number of downtimes per client across the entire system. This is known as the System Average Interrupt Frequency Index (SAIFI).
If a utility doesn’t meet SAIFI metrics, “it means it has too much outage,” said FirstEnergy spokeswoman Lauren Siburkis. “And if they fail to meet CAIDI requirements, that means it will take too long to get them back up and running [power] when a failure occurs.”
The metrics enable comparisons between periods so the company can track improvement over time, she added.
PUCO rules exclude solemn failures such as those caused by some extreme weather events, in determining whether or not companies have met their regulatory assurance standards, although annual reports contain data both before and after exemptions. But “customer interrupted minutes,” which actually counted toward reliability standards, added up to more than 1,000 years of power loss for residential customers last year.
Eight years in a row
Four utilities that failed to meet one of their standards last year provide power to more than half of Ohio’s electric customers. An Energy News Network review of data shows that every year since 2016, at least one Ohio utility has also failed to meet standards.
In 2022 the AND AES Ohio both failed to meet average customer downtime standards, and Prince did not meet the standard for average frequency of downtime in 2021 and 2022.
AES Ohio has failed to meet its standard for the average length of power outages for four years in a row, from 2019 to 2022, but spokeswoman Mary Ann Kabel said the situation is improving.
“Since 2019, the company’s CAIDI has improved year-on-year, and we are committed to providing safe and reliable services,” she said.
Previously in 2018 AEP failed to meet both performance standards. Duke Energy, Ohio failed to meet both standards in 2017 and 2016 Prince failed to meet its standard for the average time that customers who experienced outages were without power.
If companies have failed to meet any of their reliability standards in the previous year, regulators require them to provide justification and a plan to address the issues. The Ohio Administrative Code states that failure to meet the same standard for two years in a row counts as: infringement. Violations may result penaltiescorrective action or refund to customers.
Utilities’ ability to meet their performance standards depends on many factors, Schilling said. All have vegetation trimming programs within their right-of-way, but vegetation outside this area can also interfere with power lines and equipment.
“Other factors, such as aging infrastructure and maintenance, can cause outages,” Schilling said, although “utilities routinely invest in updating and maintaining their systems.”
Additional causes include damage from wildlife or car accidents, some of which may be beyond the control of utility companies.
Extreme weather conditions contributed to Duke’s failure to meet the frequency standard last year. Three major storms that occurred in July 2023 resulted in an boost in the number of outages, even though the storms did not meet the criteria for excluded events, the company sawing he said.
FirstEnergy Action plan filed in April cited line and equipment failures and trees as reasons why CEI and Toledo Edison failed to meet their standards last year. Toledo Edison and CEI plan to conduct thermal scanning of their worst-performing circuits and do additional work to upgrade lightning protection and other equipment in locations where customers frequently experience power outages. Other work is aimed at preventing tree problems.
“Tree-related emergencies are the largest contributor to downtime due to the need to safely remove vegetation before remediation work begins,” Siburkis said, “so planned tree work will have a positive impact even during major events.”
Vegetation management was also part of AES Ohio’s work when it failed to meet downtime standards. Corporate Action plan The 2023 filing said the company is working to install stronger poles and make other improvements “to reduce the severity of storm outages.” The implementation of astute grids was also part of the company’s plan, along with a revision of reliability standards.
Ohio’s updated AES standards went into effect last year. They allow service to be restored to customers in the event of a power loss in almost seven minutes longer, but require a slightly lower average frequency during power outages. A slightly lower SAIFI standard would primarily reflect the expectation of fewer downtimes.
AEP Ohio blamed arithmetic for failing to meet the outage duration standard last year. Work on the astute grid has eliminated various shorter downtimes, the company claims reported. However, fewer service interruptions increased the average duration of interruptions that actually occurred.
“AEP Ohio’s CAIDI score increased not because AEP Ohio’s performance on longer outages worsened, but rather because AEP Ohio managed to eliminate the shorter outages that kept the CAIDI average low,” Blake said.
An additional industry metric known as SAIDI, the System Average Outage Duration Index, divides the number of outages by all customers, regardless of whether they lost power or not. Using these metrics gives the impression that AEP Ohio is performing better over 25%– according to the data contained in the application submitted by the company.
House Bill 260, sponsored by Republicans Bill Seitz of Cincinnati and Monica Robb Blasdel of Columbiana, would replace SAIDI with CAIDI.
Seitz initially said he didn’t know how reliability was currently calculated. He then stated in a follow-up email that he had been informed that the change would “better encourage utilities to meet customer reliability requirements,” adding that the installation of astute meters and other work to reduce outages make the CAIDI standard “obsolete”. “
“It doesn’t make sense if we don’t have both” current standards, said Ashley Brown, a former PUCO commissioner, adding that decisions about reliability standards are best left to regulators, not the Legislature.
The bill’s proposal to change the rate “reduces the importance of individual consumer failures,” said Maureen Willis, a consumer advocate for Ohio. “Other proposed changes weaken reliability standards by excluding more outages from reliability ratings,” she added.
This article appeared for the first time Energy News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
