165. How to Improve U.S. Power Distribution System Reliability

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports SAIDI and SAIFI values in its Electric Power Annual report, which is regularly released in October each year. In the most recent report, the U.S. distribution system’s average SAIDI value including all events was 335.5 minutes per customer in 2022. If major event days were excluded, which is often a worthwhile exercise to get accurate long-term trends because hurricanes and severe winter storms, for example, can skew the numbers quite dramatically in a given year, the figure dropped to 125.7 minutes per customer. Notably, this the highest SAIDI value tallied in the past decade and it continued what has effectively been a steady year-over-year decline in performance from 2013 through 2022. (2017 saw a brief improvement over 2016, but every year before and since has been worse than the previous year during the timespan covered by the report.) For comparison, in 2013, the SAIDI value was 106.1 minutes per customer. SAIFI values do not vary as noticeably as SAIDI, but still have been worsening. In 2022, the U.S. distribution system’s average SAIFI value including all events was 1.4 power interruptions per customer. With major events excluded, SAIFI was 1.1 interruptions per customer in the U.S. While this was not substantially worse than values reported in other years over the past decade (every year from 2013 onward has been 1.0, except for 2016 when the value was also 1.1), it seems to confirm that the system hasn’t been improving. Yet, Mike Edmonds, Chief Operating Officer for S&C Electric Company, said several things can be done to improve the reliability and resiliency of the power distribution system. “The grid looks different depending on what state you’re in,” Edmonds said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “We’ve got great experience with Florida Power & Light [FPL],” he said. “We’ve helped them create a resilient grid. So, that’s not only a grid that is reliable, but a grid that can actually weather the storms and all the challenges thrown at the grid.” Notably, FPL reported in March that it had provided “the most reliable electric service in company history in 2023.” Over the past two decades, FPL said its customers have realized a remarkable 45% improvement in reliability. In NextEra Energy’s (the parent company of FPL) Sustainability Report 2023, the company reported FPL’s SAIDI was 47.1 and SAIFI was 0.85, confirming markedly better results than the U.S. averages noted earlier. Furthermore, FPL said this is the ninth time in the past 10 years that it achieved “its best-ever reliability rating.” To better understand some of the innovative new equipment S&C Electric Company offers, Edmonds provided an example. “We have some technology that does something called ‘pulse finding,’ and what Florida Power & Light does, it just lets our equipment do what it does best. If there’s a problem, it’ll pulse to see if the problem is there or not on the grid, if it’s not, it reenergizes,” he said. “This technology is available to really change how the grid operates.” Edmonds said S&C Electric Company invented the fuse 115 years ago, and he noted fuses have served the industry well since that time. However, today there is better technology available that doesn’t require a lineworker to respond to an outage to replace a fuse. “Let’s take fuses off the grid and have a fuseless grid, and have much more intelligent devices that can actually re-energize,” Edmonds decreed.