The power company plans to spend as much as $275 million across the state to continue to boost its reliability, said Mark Durbin, a spokesman for Ohio Edison. That spending includes improvements at substations and trimming trees near power lines.
“This is a focus for us and it’s something we will continue to focus on,” Durbin said.
The reports, filed annually with PUCO, provide statistics that include the average number of outages per customer and the duration of those outages. The standards are meant to ensure that customers receive reliable service, said Marty Berkowitz, a spokesman for the Ohio Consumer’s Council, which advocates for Ohio utility customers.
Only Columbus Southern Power, a utility under the umbrella of AEP, failed to meet the standard for the average length of outages, said Jason Gilham, a PUCO spokesman. The company did meet the state requirements for the number of outages.
Ohio Edison’s goal was to have outages last about 114 minutes or less. Its actual performance showed the average outage lasted about 105 minutes in 2012, down from about 113 minutes in 2011.
The utility’s requirement for average outages per customer was slightly more than 1 per year, but its actual performance was slightly less than one per year.
Dayton Power and Light, which serves about 5,500 customers in western Clark County and 13,500 customers in Champaign County, also outperformed the state standards. It ranked fifth in the state for length and second in the state for frequency of outages.
The state required DP&L to meet a standard of about 125 minutes per outage or less. The average length of its outages last year was about 120 minutes.
Its average outage per customer was set at slight more than 1 per year. It performed better than that standard, with less than 1 outage per customer in 2012.
Utility companies have been tracking the information for several years, Durbin said, but were required to meet the standards after rules that took effect in 2010.
The standards required by the state don’t include power failures from major storms, such significant ice and wind storms that have struck the area in recent years. Smaller, typical storms are included in the statistics.
Mark Vest, a spokesman for DP&L, said those major storms are uncommon and separating those figures provides a more accurate picture of how a utility performs on a daily basis.
The electric system must operate 24 hours a day under sometimes difficult weather conditions, Vest said, so daily maintenance is a significant portion of the utility’s operations. DP&L spends between $10 million and $12 million a year trimming trees over an area between 2,000 and 2,200 miles annually.
“It’s like driving down to Tampa and back and trimming every tree,” Vest said.
This is the second year Columbus Southern Power missed its standard for the duration of outages, Gilham said. PUCO will work with the company to determine the cause of the failure and it’s not yet clear what penalties the company could face.
He said the standards are one way the agency can ensure customers are receiving reliable service from the utilities.
“It’s more of us trying to be in a more proactive mode rather than a reactive mode,” Gilham said.
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