Florida Power & Light Company has been awarded the National ReliabilityOne™ Excellence Award for its innovative technology advancements, excellent customer service and power restoration efforts.
The award was presented during PA Consulting's 19th Annual ReliabilityOne Awards ceremony.
U.S. utilities continued to face challenging weather situations in 2018. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2018 was the 14th warmest year on record and the 22nd consecutive warmer-than-average year for the United States. Western states experienced droughts. The destructive and deadly Camp Fire ravaged California. Hurricanes Florence and Michael made landfall in North Carolina and Florida, respectively, while earlier in the year four Nor’easters brought heavy snow and flooding to New England. Each ReliabilityOne award recipient had to address challenges from changing weather patterns.
According to PA Consulting, the national award recipient was able to overcome trying weather events and continue to provide resilient, reliable and safe power grids. Florida Power & Light Company has advanced modeling and complex forecasting capabilities to understand environmental threats and accurately predict where storms would hit. The utility also uses drones for patrols and inspections. After the weather events, it was prepared to rapidly restore power, meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
Gregg Edeson, PA Consulting’s ReliabilityOne program director, said: “Florida Power & Light continues to reach new levels in terms of utility reliability and power restoration efforts. They are industry leaders when it comes to serving their customers in extreme weather situations and have implemented ingenious thinking and world-class technologies to patrol lines and provide real-time analysis and diagnostics on outage calls.”
Edeson added: “While all award recipients are using disruptive technologies to improve processes and serve their customers, Florida Power & Light is on the cutting edge of introducing new technologies that address real business and customer challenges.”
For 19 years, PA has been conducting reliability analyses of the nation’s electric utility industry based on 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 slight increase in IOU (investor-owned utility) average system outage duration by approximately four minutes in 2018 to 118.9 minutes, compared with the previous year.
PA’s certification and analyses of the utilities in the ReliabilityOne program found that:
- IOUs in 2018 saw a slight increase in average outage frequency compared with 2017.
- Average SAIDI performance of the Regional ReliabilityOne award recipients increased by approximately one minute from 2017 to 2018, but still remains over 65 minutes better than the average SAIDI performance of national IOUs.
- On average, ReliabilityOne participants (Regional, Midsize and Most Improved) experienced 36% fewer sustained outages, and system outages were 48% shorter than the average U.S. IOU.
- 2018 ReliabilityOne participants on average saw a 3.7% decrease in SAIFI and a decrease of 3.7% in SAIDI over the past five years. During that time, the average U.S. IOU saw an increase of 0.5% in SAIFI and a SAIDI increase of 2.8%.
- 2018 ReliabilityOne regional award recipients and their customers saw a decrease of 2.7% in SAIFI and a decrease of 1.5% in SAIDI over the last five years.
- The utilities in the Most Improved Utility category saw a 5.2% SAIFI reduction and a 6.5% SAIDI reduction over the past five years. This is better than the average IOU which saw a 0.5% increase in SAIFI and 2.8% SAIDI increase during the same time period.
- Utilities are using innovative thinking and breakthrough technologies to identify and mitigate problems on the distribution grid before outages are caused, including outage prediction algorithms, focused analytics to dispatch the right mix of crews, and a ReliabilityOne Analyzer to monitor outage performance and perform outage diagnostics.
- Utilities are collaborating on an industry-wide storm modeling approach for all types of weather events. They continue to use on-staff meteorologists to prepare for extreme weather conditions and blue-sky days.
The ReliabilityOne Awards recognized North American utilities that excelled during the 2018 calendar year in a number of critical industry categories, including reliability, storm response, technology and innovation, and customer engagement. PA’s ReliabilityOne Awards are considered to be one of the most prestigious honors in the electric utility industry, recognizing organizations that provide their customers with the highest levels of reliability.
PA recognized five regional ReliabilityOne award recipients from utilities across the United States based on overall system-wide SAIDI and SAIFI performance. Two utilities received Outstanding Reliability Performance for Midsize Utility awards recognizing the very best Midsize investor-owned utilities. Additional categories honored utilities for National Community Safety, Outstanding Customer Reliability Experience, and Outstanding Technology and Innovation. This year, PA introduced the Most Improved Utility Award given to utilities that have exhibited the highest sustained improvement levels of reliability in both duration and frequency based on data from the past five years. Six utilities received the Most Improved award.
A list of all award recipients are as follows:
National ReliabilityOne Excellence Award recipient: Florida Power & Light Company
The National ReliabilityOne Excellence Award goes to the utility that showcases a focus on customer service, technology deployment, operational successes, and data and analytics. Florida Power & Light Company excelled across all these categories in terms of outage restoration practices, real time outage diagnostics, sophisticated fault locating technology, comprehensive data capture and review, proactive customer outreach programs, and innovative customer self-serve options.
The five Regional ReliabilityOne Awards recipients are:
- West Region - San Diego Gas & Electric
- Midwest Region - We Energies
- Mid-Atlantic Region - Public Service Electric and Gas Company
- Northeast Region - Consolidated Edison Company of New York
- Southeast Region - Florida Power & Light Company
ReliabilityOne Outstanding Reliability Performance for Midsize Utility Award recipients are:
- Wisconsin Public Service
- Delmarva Power
ReliabilityOneAward recipients for specific areas of outstanding performance are:
- National Community Safety - San Diego Gas & Electric
- Outstanding Customer Reliability Experience - Consolidated Edison Company of New York
- Outstanding Technology and Innovation - Florida Power & Light Company
The six ReliabilityOne Most Improved Utility Award recipients are:
- PPL Electric Utilities
- Pepco Holdings
- Atlantic City Electric
- Southern California Edison
- Commonwealth Edison Company
- Ameren Illinois
The awards reception was held at the Brazos Hall in Austin before an audience that included energy industry experts and senior management of leading utilities.
