Customers reap smart grid benefits - less outages and faster power
restoration
Company Website:
http://www.comed.com
CHICAGO -- (Business Wire)
Despite more severe weather conditions, including recent tornadoes,
ComEd has produced its best reliability ever for the first half of a
year. For the first six months of 2015, ComEd avoided more than 879,000
customer interruptions on the system.
With passage of the Smart Grid law in 2011, ComEd embarked on a $2.6
billion program to modernize the power system in northern Illinois.
Through these investments which include smart switches that reroute
power around potential problem areas, new storm hardening and vegetation
management solutions, and cable replacement, in addition to the other
ongoing programs, nearly 5,000,000 customer interruptions have been
avoided since January 2012 through first six months of 2015. Last year
alone, more than 1.5 million interruptions were prevented, due to the
reliability improvements ComEd is making to its system.
“Preventing outages is one of our main goals, because the best outage is
the one that never happens,” said Terence R. Donnelly, Executive
Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer, ComEd. “Our investments in
smart grid technology and storm hardening are fulfilling the promise we
made to reduce outages and improve the reliability of our system for our
customers.”
In addition to reliability improvement, EIMA work has supported 3,600
full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in Illinois, including approximately
1,400 FTE jobs at the utility and its contractors.
“ComEd’s continued infrastructure investment aimed at modernizing and
bringing innovative digital equipment to the grid is an important
component to sustaining Illinois’ economic growth,” said Todd Maisch,
President and CEO of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. “We are pleased
to see consecutive years of strong performance which provides business
leaders the assurance that Illinois is the right place for their
continued growth and investment.”
In 2012, ComEd formed a storm task force and has made more than 200
enhancements to its storm restoration process. These enhancements
included GPS and mobile dispatch technology to more efficiently manage
crews to expedite restoration, a mobile operations center to bring ComEd
closer to customers in hardest hit areas, and more efficient management
of contractor crews. ComEd is continuing to build on these process
improvements, with new areas of focus this year including an enhanced
damage assessment process, better coordination of vegetation management
crews and improved material staging to ensure readiness during severe
weather. Over the past two years, process improvements already in place
have resulted in a 30 percent improvement in restoration time.
“We are continually striving to improve the service we provide and our
customers and communities have told us they are seeing tangible
results,” said Donnelly. “We will continue our progress on smart grid to
bring even greater service and reliability to our customers.”
Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd) is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon
Corporation (NYSE: EXC), the nation’s leading competitive energy
provider, with approximately 7.8 million customers. ComEd provides
service to approximately 3.8 million customers across northern Illinois,
or 70 percent of the state’s population. For more information visit ComEd.com,
and connect with the company on Facebook,
Twitter
and YouTube.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150702005902/en/
Contacts:
ComEd Media Relations
(312) 394-3500
Source: ComEd
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