Breaking the
one-hour barrier.
Clint Stanfield, Construction Foreman; executing for improved reliability
Utility outages are measured in minutes. Minutes are time. And as we all know, time is money. Bottom line, if the power goes out, then machines stop, molten steel hardens, registers don’t ring, production is lost and so is a whole lot of commerce. This is why reliability is a huge concern for those of us at EPB. And why we are so proud of the fact that for the first time in our history, our System Average Incident Duration Index (SAIDI) number for the year is below 60 minutes.
SAIDI is the measure of how many minutes on average each customer experienced an outage. As recently as 2012, an EPB customer (including both commercial and residential) averaged an outage time of 66 minutes, an excellent number by industry standards. But today, thanks to the improved reliability provided by our Smart Grid’s distribution automation, that number has dropped to under an hour. That’s a new threshold for EPB and a real accomplishment.
But our engineers and technicians aren’t stopping there. They’re using data and new tools made possible by the thousands of sensors on our grid to find more ways to cut downtime for everyone, because a more reliable grid is just good business. And that benefits everyone in our community.
