Consolidated Edison Company of New York wins the National Reliability Award at PA Consulting's 24th annual ReliabilityOne® Awards

NEW YORK, Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- At last night's 24th Annual ReliabilityOne® Awards ceremony, PA Consulting (PA), the global innovation and transformation consultancy, awarded the National Reliability Award to Consolidated Edison Company of New York. Six additional utilities were also recognized for outstanding reliability and resiliency achievements in their respective regions.

PA Consulting's ReliabilityOne® program is committed to working with US utilities to improve power grid reliability. On average, ReliabilityOne® program participant utilities experience 50 percent fewer sustained power outages, and their collective system saw 60 percent shorter outage durations than the average US investor-owned utility.

The ReliabilityOne® Awards recognize North American utilities that excelled during the 2023 calendar year in critical industry categories including resiliency, security, reliability, and customer engagement. Founded in 2000, PA Consulting's annual ReliabilityOne® Awards are widely considered to be one of the most prestigious honors in the electric utility industry, recognizing organizations that provide their customers with the highest levels of reliability and resiliency.

Derek HasBrouck, PA Consulting's ReliabilityOne® Program Director, said: "For the past 24 years, the ReliabilityOne® program has been an independent forum for utility leaders to share best practices and methods to overcome challenges. It also identifies and recognizes those leaders who have delivered the most reliable electric service to their customers. We are delighted to announce that Consolidated Edison Company of New York has been recognized as this year's most reliable US utility. Con Edison has delivered a best-ever reliability performance since the full deployment of AMI, adopting system designs and operating concepts from both the transmission system as well as traditional overhead systems to make their underground networks more resilient and reliable. This, combined with their focus on understanding and preparations to mitigate against the next contingency indicates their continued focus to provide safe, resilient, and reliable power to their customers."

PA's certification and analyses of the utilities in the ReliabilityOne® program found that:

• Investor-owned utilities as a group delivered improved reliability in 2023 compared to 2022. The average IOU saw 8 percent decreases in both SAIFI and SAIDI
• Utilities are adapting to increased electrification (building loads and transportation). Unlike previous growth, this round of growth has come from concentration of load rather than from expanding the existing service area footprint
• Utilities are continuing to leverage technologies that provide more comprehensive situational awareness of their service territory, their assets, and customers. Drones, Power Quality monitors, as well as LiDAR driven intelligence have increasingly become adopted for everyday utility uses. This new type of information contributed to utilities' enhanced situational awareness of asset performance and predictive maintenance actions to be taken
• Utilities are increasingly aware of delivering reliable power to their customers. Leading utilities are starting to identify, quantify, and design mitigations around future anticipated risks, be they slower moving storms, higher windspeed events, floods, or wildfires. These utilities are better able to use data to identify risky parts of their systems (transmission, distribution, and associated communications), and develop targeted mitigation solutions to ensure they can continue to deliver electricity in a safe and reliable manner.

PA recognized regional ReliabilityOne® award recipients from utilities across the US, based on overall system wide SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI performance. Regional awards criteria reflect unique challenges for utilities serving metropolitan locations and those serving suburban and rural locations.

The list of all award recipients is as follows:

National ReliabilityOne® Award recipient:

The ReliabilityOne® National Reliability Award was presented to Consolidated Edison Company of New York

This year's ReliabilityOne® National Reliability Award recognizes a utility that has continued to deliver top reliability performance in the US. In 2023, Consolidated Edison delivered their best ever SAIFI and SAIDI since the start of their AMI journey. Its industry leading performance is 85 percent more reliable than the average US IOU, and is amongst the most reliable in the world. Con Edison's investments in AMI, power quality monitoring, innovative underground network protection schemes, and its work to accommodate customer interconnection requests in challenging situations contribute to their world leading reliability and resiliency performance.

This year's Regional ReliabilityOne® Awards recipients are:

• West Region (Metropolitan) – San Diego Gas & Electric
• Mid-Atlantic Region (Metropolitan) – Public Service Electric and Gas Company
• Northeast Region (Metropolitan) – Consolidated Edison Company of New York
• Northeast Region (Suburban) – Orange and Rockland Utilities
• Southeast Region (Metropolitan) – Florida Power & Light Company
• Midwest Region (Metropolitan) – Commonwealth Edison Co.
• Top Mid-Sized Utility – Wisconsin Public Service Company

ReliabilityOne® Award recipients for specific areas of outstanding performance are:

• National Electrical Infrastructure Security – Florida Power & Light Company for its industry leading development and operationalization of compliance data to inform operations and emergency preparations
• Customer Engagement – Public Service Electric and Gas Company for its continued Customer Centricity focus, and the development of its customer facing outage tracker which brings real-time status updates to affected customers throughout the lifecycle of their specific outage from incident to restoration
• Climate Action Leader – Commonwealth Edison Co. for its focused on integrating renewable resources (solar and microgrids) on to the distribution grid, as well as the clean energy transition investments in Economic Improvement Eligible Communities and community solar deployments
• System Resiliency – San Diego Gas & Electric for its state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center, integration of data and tools to provide guidance and insights on projected risks faced to help make informed decisions.

The awards reception was held at the Andaz in Savannah, Georgia before an audience that included energy industry experts and senior management of leading utilities.

For more information on PA's work in the energy and utilities sector, please visit: www.paconsulting.com/industries/energy-and-utilities

For more information on PA's ReliabilityOne® Awards, please visit: www.paconsulting.com/industries/energy-and-utilities/reliabilityone-2024

About PA Consulting 
We believe in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future. As strategies, technologies, and innovation collide, we create opportunity from complexity. Our diverse teams of experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough technologies to progress further, faster. Our clients adapt and transform, and together we achieve enduring results. We are over 4,000 strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers, and technologists. And we have deep expertise in consumer and manufacturing, defense and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government and public services, health and life sciences, and transport. Our teams operate globally from offices across the US, UK, Ireland, Nordics, and Netherlands. Discover more at paconsulting.com and connect with PA on LinkedIn and X. PA. Bringing Ingenuity to Life.

PA Consulting's ReliabilityOne® awards are presented to electric utilities providing their customers with the highest levels of reliability in the industry. PA Consulting's ReliabilityOne® study is based on standard industry reliability statistics that measure the frequency and duration of electric power outages. As a group, ReliabilityOne® participants on average experienced over 50 percent fewer sustained outages, and their collective system saw 60 percent shorter outage durations than the average US investor-owned utility. PA Consulting has been analyzing electric utility performance since 1987. For more information about PA Consulting, visit www.paconsulting.com/industries/energy-and-utilities.

SOURCE PA Consulting