Atlantic City Electric recently received PA Consulting’s 2018 ReliabilityOne™ Outstanding Midsize Utility Award for providing exceptional reliability. In fact, last year our customers experienced the lowest average number of electric outages in our company’s history, as well as the fastest restoration times ever.
“We are extremely honored to be recognized for our efforts in providing customers with the highest level of reliability in our industry,” said Dave Velazquez, president and CEO of Pepco Holdings, which includes Atlantic City Electric. “This award exemplifies our commitment to provide the highest quality of service for our communities and is a testament to the hard work our employees perform each day to meet the energy needs of our customers.”
Our customers continue benefitting from the major enhancements we are making to the local energy grid. In 2017, the average number of outages decreased by 17-percent from the previous low, set in 2015. When customers did experience an outage, we restored power an average of seven minutes faster than the previous record set in 2015. During the past five years, the number of electric outages has decreased by more than 40-percent and outage length has been reduced by 18-percent.
These improvements are a result of hundreds of millions of dollars we invested in southern New Jersey during the past five years to further improve service reliability for customers, including about $312 million in 2017 alone. This work includes enhancing the local energy grid with new devices, stronger poles, and more modern equipment, while trimming trees, which can cause up to 40-percent of power outages for customers each year. We also use innovative technologies to improve system reliability, such as specialized equipment that can automatically restore service more quickly or isolate damage.
All mid-sized energy companies operating energy delivery grids in North America and serving between 300,000 and 750,000 customers, are eligible for consideration for PA Consulting’s Outstanding Midsize Utility Award. Recipients are based primarily on system reliability statistics that measure the frequency and duration of customer outages. After initial recipients are identified, each company undergoes an on-site certification process, which provides an independent review and confirmation of the policies, processes and systems used to collect, analyze and report a company’s reliability results.