Muscatine Power and Water has received national recognition for achieving exceptional electric reliability in 2018. The recognition comes from the American Public Power Association (www.PublicPower.org), a trade group that represents more than 2,000 not-for-profit, community-owned electric utilities.

“This recognition demonstrates public power’s exceptional reliability,” said the Association’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Services Michael Hyland. “Community-owned electric utilities have a strong track record of reliability — nationwide, the average public power customer has their lights out for less than half the time, compared to other types of utilities.”

APPA helps members track power outage and restoration data through its subscription-based eReliability Tracker service and then compares the data to national statistics tracked by the U.S. Energy Information Administration for all types of electric utilities.

“We’re proud to receive this recognition,” said MP&W General Manager Gage Huston. “It’s a testament to the hard work our staff puts in to ensure the lights stay on for all our customers. Field crews, system operations staff, and system design folks all played key roles in getting the eReliability tracker in place and achieving these impressive reliability statistics.”

Outage data from 2018 exemplifies that hard-work as well as the benefits from reliability investments made by Muscatine Power & Water year in and year out.

Graphic with Red Circle, Blue Circle and Blue Hexagon

Benchmark achievements include:

  • A System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) metric value of 15 minutes per customer which is 9x better than all US electric Utilities (135 minutes);
  • An Average Service Availability Index (ASAI) of 99.995% as compared to an ASAI of 99.975% for the Midwest region and an ASAI of 99.958% for utilities equal in customers served

Also of interest in 2018, the top two causes for MP&W outages were planned utility maintenance and customer service outages; the former demonstrating MP&W’s ongoing commitment to quality and reliability even as they implement infrastructure upgrades, and the latter, in response to customers’ own requests for temporary disconnections. For unplanned outages, squirrels and equipment failure were the top causes for service interruptions.

Tags