Pennsylvania’s power grid had 71 “reportable outage events” last year, the most in more than thirty years, according to the annual Electric Service Reliability Report by the state Public Utility Commission. That’s up from 49 incidents the previous year. The PUC blames severe storms, vegetation-related damage, and, most alarmingly, the impacts of an aging grid.
Only three of the state’s eleven power companies achieved the standard performance metrics across all categories for the year and for the three-year rolling average.
Penelec had 1,058,034 power interruptions for 210.7 million customer minutes for the year. In 2023, it had 938,093 interruptions for a total duration of 177.5 minutes. There was one major interruption as well.
Trees and equipment failure were Penelec’s top two outage causes. The report notes that Penelec’s performance “is still well below that of its performance in 2015.”
https://www.puc.pa.gov/media/3565/24_electric-reliability-report_final.pdf
