Commonwealth Edison Co. told Illinois regulators in its annual reliability report that customers experienced a 10% reduction in the frequency of outages in 2017, and fewer customers were impacted by long outages.
The findings were submitted to the Illinois Commerce Commission on June 1.
According to the report, the Exelon Corp. subsidiary attributed the reliability improvements largely to smart-grid investments.
"Since the smart grid program was launched in 2012, the frequency and duration of outages has been reduced by nearly 50[%]," ComEd President and COO Terence Donnelly said in a June 7 news release. "We are now focused on sustaining this new higher standard and making additional investments."
The utility also reported that the percentage of customers in ComEd service areas experiencing a power interruption of 12 hours or more decreased by 81% in 2017, compared to the five-year average prior to the smart grid program.
In February, the commission approved ComEd's plan to construct a microgrid in Chicago's South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville. It will be connected to a microgrid serving the Illinois Institute of Technology. The demonstration project has received more than $5 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to study how microgrids enable the integration of renewables and improve reliability during extreme weather or other catastrophic events.
