PECO customers experienced the benefits of strategic infrastructure investments and reliability-focused projects and processes in 2022. This work helps prevent customer outage by modernizing the electric grid, and reducing the impact of extreme weather, helping keep lights on for our customers. These efforts resulted in record-breaking reliability performance in 2022. Last year, PECO customers experienced the fewest number of power outages in the company’s history, 12 percent lower than the previous year, and when service was interrupted, crews were able to safely restore power in 89 minutes, on average. Eighty-seven percent of PECO customers experienced zero or one interruption in service in 2022.
During the past decade, our region has experienced some of the most damaging storms in the company’s history. With storms increasing in intensity, our year-round infrastructure investment efforts are more critical than ever. As such, we continue to modernize the electric grid and make it stronger, more weather-resistant, and less vulnerable to storm damage.
We are also applying innovative technologies that will help reduce outages and enhance service for our customers. Some of these efforts include:
- Using drones to enable more efficient equipment inspections and faster damage assessments following storms
- Installing stronger poles and tree-resistant aerial cable
- Installing specialized equipment, known as reclosers, that can automatically restore service or isolate damage
In 2022 alone, we completed more than 430 electric reliability projects across southeastern Pennsylvania as part of our Reliability & Resiliency Plan, which outlines investments to make PECO’s energy infrastructure more resilient in the face of intensifying weather patterns and to enable clean energy resources. This work has helped improve reliability and reduce costs for customers by avoiding outages as and has increased efficiencies in identifying and restoring outages that cannot be avoided.
These measures ladder up to PECO’s investment of approximately $7.8 billion during the next five years across our electric and natural gas systems to inspect equipment, complete targeted system enhancements and corrective maintenance, invest in new equipment, and perform vegetation management. We are proud of these efforts to deliver enhanced reliability to our customers and are continually focused on delivering even better results in the future.