Hamilton electric system has best year for outages in at least a decade
Apr. 12—Hamilton's city-owned electric system had its best performance for power outages last year since at least 2010, Bill Hudson, the city's assistant director of utility operations, told members of the city's Public Utilities Commission last week.
The "average service interruption duration" for the city's electric customers was 32.13 minutes during 2020, "which is the lowest it's ever been, that I have record of," Hudson said.
The figures he has that are comparable to the ones prepared by the American Public Power Association date back to 2010. It's difficult to compare with years before then because different calculation methods were used, Hudson said.
"We do not generate these numbers," Hudson said. "This is generated by the APPA for us. It's part of a service they offer us."
"If you compare it to other utilities in the APPA that use the tracker, their average is 139 minutes," he said. In this region of the country, the figure was almost 82 minutes, and "for utilities our size, it was 220, so even with all the challenges we had with covid last year, we had very few interruptions."
Also: "Our utility was energized 99.9939″ percent of the time," Hudson said. "So we had very little down time last year, as the big picture."
Hudson cited three reasons for the good performance: — The city five years ago hired Dave Bienemann as its municipal arborist and utility forester, largely as a way to improve utility outages. Since he arrived, the city has worked aggressively to eliminate dead or dying trees from public places, and has trimmed tree branches away from electric lines. — Hamilton utilities used to focus on how quickly they could respond to situations that create outages, such as fallen trees. Recently, the city has made hardware changes to its transmission and distribution system that prevent outages from happening, or for quickly being resolved. — Also, "Some of it is that we didn't have a lot of storms last year," he said. "That skews it, but the improvements we've made in our tree-trimming and our system design has greatly improved this number."
The average Hamilton electric customer had less than one interruption last year: 0.45 of them. With the system, widespread power outages experienced by Duke Energy, which affect Hamilton's relatively small utility, are not counted against Hamilton's numbers, Hudson explained to PUC members.
For all utilities that used the APPA's tracking system last year, their average interruption was 0.86. In this part of the country it was 0.73, and for utilities Hamilton's size, it was 1.08.
"It's just another thing to show that our system did much better than the average system in our country last year," Hudson said.
For those in Hamilton who had outages last year, the average time without electricity was about 72 minutes, below the average of 185 minutes for the utility the city's size.
Bienemann told the commission when he arrived, the city had 2,000 dead trees in public areas. That now is down to 350.
Bienemann noted that two weeks ago, when there were wind gusts of at least 50 mph, "and we didn't have any trees come down."
