Two utilities tie for top honor at PA Consulting's ReliabilityOne Awards
Florida Power & Light and San Diego Gas & Electric tied for the top national honor at PA Consulting’s 21st annual ReliabilityOne Awards, which recognize the most reliable electric utilities in North America.
The two companies were the top overall performers in PA’s analysis, which includes resiliency, reliability, storm response, technology and innovation, sustainability, and customer engagement.
Florida Power & Light was the sole victor in last year’s awards.
“Both Florida Power & Light and San Diego Gas & Electric are top performers who are consistently driving efficient customer restoration efforts,” Gregg Edeson, PA Consulting’s ReliabilityOne program director, said. “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’s analysis includes publicly available data from the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), which measures the average outage duration per customer, and System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), which measures the average number of interruptions per customer.
There was a very small decrease in the average system outage duration at investor-owned utilities (IOUs), dropping from 122.4 minutes in 2019 to 122 minutes in 2020. ReliabilityOne award winners experienced 44% fewer sustained outages than the average IOU, and their outages were 55% shorter than the average IOU.
Leading utilities are using innovative technologies to boost the reliability of systems and grids. Two of the ReliabilityOne winners utilize PA Consulting’s iPredict, an AI system that predicts failures in critical electricity distribution assets before they impact customers.
This year’s six regional winners were:
West Region (Metropolitan) – San Diego Gas & Electric
Mid-Atlantic Region (Metropolitan) – Public Service Electric and Gas Company
Northeast Region (Metropolitan) – Consolidated Edison Company of New York
Northeast Region (Suburban and Rural) – National Grid Upstate New York
Southeast Region (Metropolitan) – Florida Power & Light Company
Southeast Region (Suburban and Rural) – Gulf Power
This year’s category winners were:
Public Power – Austin Energy
Most Improved – Wisconsin Public Service
Outstanding Customer Engagement – Wisconsin Public Service
Outstanding Technology and Innovation – Florida Power & Light Company
Outstanding System Resiliency – Florida Power & Light Company
Outstanding Grid Sustainability – San Diego Gas & Electric
Outstanding Community Safety – Consolidated Edison Company of New York
The awards ceremony was held at Skybox in San Diego.
