What is Reliability?
Reliability can be defined as a utility’s ability to provide continuous electric service to their customers in order to support their lifestyles and run their businesses. Many customers, from homeowners to large industries, are very intolerant of any kind of interruptions. However, these interruptions can cost millions of dollars for manufacturing processes that have to be scrapped due to the loss of power even for a short interval. Many residential customers also depend on and expect near-perfect reliability because they use electricity to run the technologies that manage their homes or support their home-based businesses.
With these high expectations of uninterrupted service, all public power utilities face the challenge of providing the most reliable service possible.
Reliable service delivery has always been a key success factor and core mission objective of the LADWP. Historically, the LADWP’s Power System reliability has benchmarked in the top quartile of the electric utility industry.
In December 2005, the LADWP contracted the engineering consulting services of EPRI Solutions, an independent engineering consultant company. EPRI performed a transmission and distribution system reliability assessment focusing on the transmission and distribution reliability, maintenance, and project prioritization processes. As a result of the assessment, EPRI recommended the establishment of a Reliability Engineering Group (REG) to make impartial reviews and recommendations on the prioritization of capital and maintenance programs.
The primary missions of the REG are:
- To focus on the distribution system and component reliability
- To assess condition of distribution equipment
- Identify the root causes of reliability problems
- Determine cost effective strategies to improve the overall system reliability.
The REG also develops processes to effectively track, analyze, trend, and manage the distribution organization’s reliability measures, prioritize reliability capital projects, and benchmark the organization’s performance.
Plan
The Reliability Engineering Group tracks system performance and provides a snapshot of LADWP’s system performance to demonstrate the level of service from year to year. We compile reliability benchmarking data which allows us to compare service reliability levels with other utilities and provide key operational information to upper management. We communicate to the Los Angeles City Council and our customers our effort to improve our reliability performance from one year to the next.
We focus to improve our system reliability performance by tracking the following:
- Individual distribution circuit performance
- Substation performance
- Problem areas on our system
- Equipment failure trends
For more information on existing plans please visit the Power System Reliability Program.