Powering Strong Communities

Annual Reliability Benchmarking

Subscribers to the eReliability Tracker receive an annual national reliability report customized to their utility size and region, enabling utilities to benchmark their reliability performance. The American Public Power Association created the eReliability Tracker Annual Report to assist utilities in efforts to understand and analyze their electric system.

The report focuses on distribution system reliability across the country and is customized to each utility’s system. By focusing on comparing utilities of similar customer size and region, the report allows utilities to assess where they stand on a national level and on a regional level.

The annual report analyzes 5 IEEE statistics: System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI), Momentary Average Interruption Frequency Index (MAIFI) and Average Service Availability Index (ASAI). Averaging these indices by region provides utilities insight into how their reliability matches up to other utilities with similar demographics.

The report also analyzes outage causes. Equipment failure, extreme weather events, wildlife, and vegetation are some of the most common causes of electric system outages. However, certain factors, such as regional weather and animal/vegetation patterns, can make a different set of causes more prevalent to a specific group of utilities. Sections of the annual report can provide an individual utility information on common causes of outages, all utilities in the region, and all utilities using the eReliability Tracker.