The new Utility Performance Report for 2023 is the latest edition of CUB’s annual series reporting federal data on how Michigan electric and gas utilities stack up to utilities around the country on performance on key reliability, affordability and environmental metrics (Blog posts here and here provide some interesting detail about last year’s report).
This year’s report stands out for two reasons:
- For the first time in this series, the data in the report is accompanied by visualizations of even more data available via an interactive page on the CUB website. The figures were developed in Tableau, an industry standard data visualization software. The Tableau platform offers readers an opportunity to perform their own analysis of these data: they can interact with the figures to compare states on different performance metrics, view historical trends for all the metrics we discuss in this report, and compare utilities nationwide.
- 2021, the year for most of the data in this report, was unfortunately a bad year for power outages, and several reliability metrics registered some of the worst results of the past several years for Michigan utilities. For example, the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), which measures the average duration of outages for each customer served by a utility, (including Major Event Days) was 873.2 minutes in 2021, much higher than the five-year average of 612 minutes, which in turn was much higher than the 2020 score of 411 minutes.
Whether 2021 data suggests a short-term anomaly or represent a longer-term trend of worsening climate challenges will only become evident as more time unfolds.
We will have more blog posts coming soon to further break down the findings of the latest Utility Performance Report.
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