Reliability (Customer)
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GUIDING PRINCIPLE: To have the best in class reliability by customer segment. Customer reliability means the delivery of an uninterrupted supply of electricity to BC Hydro customers. While customers currently report a high level of satisfaction with overall system reliability, as seen in the Customer Satisfaction information, BC Hydro’s actual reliability results did not meet our annual targets. The leading causes for these results are attributed to transmission and substation outages, trees falling onto our power lines and distribution equipment failure. Aging assets, adverse weather due to the nature of where we live and changing climate, combined with high impact incidents such as the downtown Vancouver cable fire in July 2008 were also key contributing factors to reliability. Following the winter of fiscal 2007, which was one of the stormiest seasons in B.C. in recent years, BC Hydro has put in place a number of initiatives such as the system resiliency program, customer-based reliability initiative, distribution emergency response continuous improvement plan, and outage communication initiative. These initiatives are intended to strengthen the system to withstand foreign interference, improve reliability at the circuit level for specific customer segment, reduce outage restoration time, and provide timely, accurate outage information to customers. An assessment of overall improvement based on the last three years shows that in a number of communities such as Alert Bay, Campbell River and Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, and Powell River, Sunshine Coast and Vancouver in the Lower Mainland, reliability in terms of outage frequency and/or duration has improved in fiscal 2009 relative to the previous two years. As well, successes have included visits to over 40 communities most adversely affected by storm events in recent years to provide outage information, communicate critical distribution infrastructure information and gather community input. These meetings have been well received, with positive feedback provided directly at the meetings and indirectly through coverage in the local media, and in the customer satisfaction survey. The impacts of these infrastructure improvements will continue to be felt in the years to come. Strategies in the 2008/09-2010/11 Service Plan: In last year’s Service Plan, we stated we would focus on:
Reliability and stormsBC Hydro’s vast service territory, predominantly overhead distribution system, as well as the province’s terrain, weather and vegetation, significantly affects our ability to cost-effectively achieve higher overall levels of reliability. In fiscal 2009, BC Hydro experienced more widespread outages caused by transmission and substation issues than in previous years. These outages impacted larger numbers of customers and our ability to restore service was hindered by the difficult terrain in which our crews had to work. Inclement weather such as snowstorms and windstorms also pose significant challenges to BC Hydro’s distribution system. However, compared to the last two years, fiscal 2009 has been a relatively mild year for storm activities, except for December 2008 when a series of wind and snowstorms swept across the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island, interrupting power supply to approximately 260,000 customers, resulting in 1.2 million lost customer hours. Reliability (Customer)
CAIDI is the average interruption in hours per interrupted customer. SAIFI is a measure of how many sustained interruptions an average customer will experience over the course of a year. CEMI-4 is the percentage of customers experiencing four or more outages during a given time period. Major uncontrollable events (i.e. windstorms, earthquakes, forest fires) are not included if they cause an outage that results in more than 70,000 lost customer hours or more than one per cent of annual lost customer hours in the distribution system. While major uncontrollable events are not included in the numbers above, controllable causes are included. These include equipment failure or human error at the distribution, substation or transmission level, even if the resulting lost hours are in excess of one per cent of the annual customer hours. BC Hydro’s targets are set against normalized results which exclude major uncontrollable events as noted above. Normalized CAIDI (excluding major events) is worse than Plan due to longer-than-planned outage restoration time. Adverse weather, trees falling onto power lines and distribution equipment failure are the major contributing factors for the unfavourable performance. Normalized SAIFI is worse than Plan as normalized customer interruptions are more than 20 per cent higher than Plan. Higher-than-expected outage frequency due to transmission and substation outages, adverse weather and trees (growing or falling onto power lines) is the leading causes of the unfavourable SAIFI performance. CEMI-4 is a customer-focused reliability measure implemented in fiscal 2007 to provide customers with an intuitive understanding of BC Hydro's reliability performance. Fiscal 2009 year-end CEMI-4 is worse than Plan due to increased outage frequency primarily caused by transmission and substation outages, adverse weather and trees. At year-end CEMI-4 was 11.6 per cent, meaning that 208,200 customers have had four or more outages in a year. BC Hydro participates in an annual Transmission and Distribution Benchmarking Study conducted by First Quartile Consulting. In fiscal 2009, BC Hydro’s reliability performance (CAIDI and SAIFI including major events) ranked in the third quartile relative to leading Canadian and U.S. utilities participating in the study. Customer GrowthDemand Growth (With and Without Demand-Side Management)
The growth rate is calculated as the year-over-year change in domestic load. However, despite higher customer numbers, overall load decreased due to the economic impact on BC Hydro’s industrial customers. Slower growth in the residential and commercial sector, and the negative growth rate in the industrial sector, added up to a decline in total BC Hydro firm sales in fiscal 2009 relative to fiscal 2008. Results for Demand Growth without DSM, published in prior year reports, may differ due to changes in BC Hydro’s historical annual acquired energy savings. Even with the economic downturn in the second half of 2008, BC Hydro experienced strong customer growth this year. Approximately 34,000 new accounts were added in fiscal 2009, compared to about 30,000 a year earlier. In early fiscal 2009, the North and South Interior saw significant growth. Municipal work continues to drive growth in the South Interior. On Vancouver Island, growth was primarily driven by retirement and resort communities and vacation homes. In Vancouver, despite reduced housing starts, growth continued but developers and investors did place a number of construction projects on hold, which will be reflected in the results for fiscal 2010. Lastly, major infrastructure projects such as the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Canada Line and major highway improvements continued to contribute to growth in the Lower Mainland. System reliability improvementsIn order to reduce the impact of major weather events upon our customers, BC Hydro implemented the System Resiliency Program. Currently in its second year of implementation, system resiliency is a five-year capital investment program in response to the extreme storm season of fiscal 2007 which resulted in an unprecedented level of power interruptions to our customers. Its purpose is to increase the ability of the distribution system to withstand or avoid events like adverse weather and trees falling onto the power lines. It should also help to minimize the impact of interruptions by building flexibility into the system to re-route power and reduce outage restoration times. Overall design and construction work on capital projects scheduled for completion in fiscal 2009 is 95 per cent complete at year-end with expenditures of $23.2 million. Projects spanned communities across North and South Vancouver Island, the Lower Mainland, the Fraser Valley, the Okanagan, Thompson/Shuswap, Prince George, Dawson Creek, Williams Lake, and Fort Nelson. In the vegetation management area, 100 per cent of the annual vegetation work plan on 83 targeted circuits has been completed as at March 31, 2009 with actual expenditures of $4.2 million. Key communities where vegetation management work was completed include: White Rock/Tsawwassen, Mission, Whonnock, and Richmond to Chilliwack, as well as others in the Whistler area and on Vancouver Island. Grid modernizationOver the past year, there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the need to modernize power delivery systems worldwide. BC Hydro is also considering a variety of technological options and system advancements to increase our system’s reliability, encourage energy conservation and improve our safety performance. One of the components of grid modernization is smart metering and the infrastructure attached to it. Grid modernization will incorporate advanced automation in control and monitoring equipment, information technology and communications to improve grid performance and support an array of services for customers, such as faster outage restoration. In fiscal 2009, BC Hydro developed a Smart Grid framework to support a common understanding of the Smart Grid among utilities, and we are using it to guide our vision of the modern grid. The Smart Metering & Infrastructure (SMI) Program will provide the foundation to automate, modernize and upgrade our electricity grid. It will support fundamental changes to electricity delivery and usage, making the right information and tools available to help customers manage their own electricity consumption and make more energy efficient choices. The SMI Program provides direct benefits to BC Hydro customers in the near term and lays the infrastructure to support future distribution system applications and technologies, including distributed generation and preparing for plug-in vehicles. In fiscal 2009, a process was undertaken to explore the technologies and suppliers in the marketplace and gather market intelligence about other smart metering projects in North America and Europe. From this work, the Smart Metering & Infrastructure Program was further refined into four integrated projects. In aggregate, the projects have a positive net present value and will be submitted to the BCUC for review and approval. The four integrated projects are:
Remote community electrificationIn fiscal 2009, BC Hydro’s Remote Community Electrification program, which provides remote B.C. communities with the opportunity to receive reliable and sustainable electrical services, moved several initiatives with communities forward. We continue to work with a number of First Nations communities to build lasting relationships and determine collaborative energy solutions that work for their communities. Wuikinuxv is one example where BC Hydro provided operations support, ensuring the community had a second winter without a serious power failure. The program also provided operations support to Port Douglas and Tipella where the two communities combined experienced only two hours of total outages in the last year. BC Hydro also began implementing the “Power Smart for Remote Communities” and “Emerging Alternative Energy” programs. These two programs continue to help BC Hydro pursue alternatives to reduce the amount of diesel used in remote communities, a policy action in the BC Energy Plan. This year, working with the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources (MEMPR), we have taken energy saving kits to the communities of Uchucklesaht, Hesquiaht, Samahquam, Skatin, Port Douglas and Tipella. BC Hydro's involvement in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic GamesAs an official supporter of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, BC Hydro will provide clean power for the events, and leave behind an infrastructure legacy that will benefit British Columbians. This includes building the electrical infrastructure and providing operational support for the venues. We are also leveraging our official supporter status to benefit employee engagement and energy conservation. The electrical infrastructure and operational support planning for 17 mountain and city venues are on schedule with nine of the venues connected and the remainder targeted to be completed by summer 2009. In addition, both internal and external sponsorship activation activities, the Outreach “Power the Games: Save Like a Champion” Tour and Team Power Smart incentive programs, are underway. BC Hydro is also lucky to have a Winter Paralympian as an employee. Lauren Woolstencroft is an engineer in training working on the Olympic venues. She is also a member of Team Power Smart and is helping us to spread the conservation message.
Benchmarking and customer reliabilityBC Hydro participates annually in several benchmarking studies with leading Canadian and U.S. utilities to compare our performance relative to other utilities, to analyze drivers of superior performance and to identify best practices and opportunities for continuous improvement. The studies have shown that notwithstanding our service territory being significantly larger than other utilities surveyed, we are one of the lowest cost service providers and have many of the industry’s best practices in place. In particular, our distribution wires business has been consistently ranked among the best in terms of distribution expenditures per customer, a relevant benchmark for distribution efficiency. However, our reliability performance does not compare favourably with the panel of North American utilities due to our vast and largely rural service territory, predominantly overhead system, and vegetation challenges. BC Hydro has three times as many trees per overhead pole mile as the North American average. Since approximately 85 per cent of our distribution system is overhead (more than almost all the utilities surveyed), the system is much more susceptible to major weather events and the attendant tree-related problems. In summary, considering the challenges inherent in our operating environment, BC Hydro is able to provide an acceptable level of reliable service to the customers while maintaining its position as a low cost service provider. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A Certified Utility Arborist preparing a grand fir for removal under the System Resiliency Hazard Tree Program. Photo credit: Jeff Labelle, Vegetation Planning Manager. 
The Power the Games: Save like a Champion Tour will be travelling across the province attending community events in fiscal 2010. The Conservation Lab, seen here, will be at many of these events. Planning for the tour, the largest ever for BC Hydro’s Community Outreach teams, occurred in fiscal 2009.Last Modified: Aug 17, 2011
