ComEd Fast Becoming a Model for Reliability
Exelon-owned Commonwealth Edison Company, or ComEd, is gaining a reputation as an electric utility that is extremely focused on reliability. The Illinois-based company has made tremendous strides in terms of minimizing customer outages in recent years – in fact, the company claims it has avoided 7.7 million interruptions from 2012-2017, and it is ranked third best in the entire industry in terms of outage duration. Overall, the company’s reliability has improved by a whopping 60% in the past 5 years.
How ComEd has Improved Reliability
The reliability enhancements are driven by a 10-year, $2.6 billion effort to modernize the grid, facilitated by the passage of the 2011 Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act (EIMA) or “Smart Grid Law.”
A large chunk of this modernization effort involves the deployment of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), or smart meters. As of the end of 2018, the company had deployed nearly 4 million smart meters, which among other benefits improves the utility’s data gathering and network communications capabilities.
But AMI is not the only area the company is committed to investing. ComEd has also invested in “smart switches” that automatically divert power away from problem areas, expansions of customer data and distribution centers, and technologies designed to squeeze additional efficiency from generation assets. In addition to reliability improvements, the grid modernization efforts will help accommodate the increase in renewable energy sources, microgrids, and electric vehicles or EVs.
In addition to the aforementioned grid enhancements, ComEd is also increasing customer visibility into its performance. The company recently announced that it will be providing its customers with personalized reliability reports that summarize usage and outage data. This level of transparency is unprecedented, and will allow customers to see the fruit of ComEd’s efforts by comparing trends over time.
ComEd definitely has the right idea, as these initiatives will improve customer satisfaction, enhance the company’s ability to adapt to change, and optimize the company’s ability to leverage new technologies in the future. That said, the company would not be this successful in these efforts without the full support of the state of Illinois, which is one of the most progressive states in the country when it comes to grid enhancements. Hopefully, once ComEd proves the business case, other states will follow suit. I, for one, will be tracking this closely.
