The results are in. The County's Pepco Work Group received nearly 12,000 responses to the survey it conducted in January and February. A total of 10,895 residents responded, while 654 businesses completed the survey. Among the findings reported by Pepco customers taking the survey are:
- Almost 95% reported they had experienced at least one outage of more than five hours in the past year. Just over 50% also reported that they had experienced non-major-event-related outages of more than one hour in the past year.
- The economic costs of long outages experienced in the past year can be estimated, based on reports obtained from survey respondents, from $22.9 to $114.6 million for residents in Montgomery County and $21.1 to $211 million for businesses. Pepco’s Montgomery County customers appear to be incurring outage-related costs that are on the same magnitude as Pepco’s 2010 earnings of $139 million.
- 10,430 residential respondents, or 95.7%, experienced one or more outages of longer than five hours in the past year. Of these respondents, almost 65% reported calling Pepco more than twice to check the status of the outage. Only 5% of Pepco’s residential customers reported that they did not attempt to call Pepco at all. Of those who experienced long outages, 85.5% incurred costs or other economic losses that they otherwise would not have incurred.
- 609 commercial respondents, or 94.9%, experienced one or more outages of longer than five hours in the past year. Of those who experienced long outages, 83.3% incurred costs or other economic losses that they otherwise would not have incurred.
There are a number of cases pending before the Public Service Commission as well as legislation being considered in the Maryland General Assembly that may help to improve Pepco’s reliability. To learn more, see the Pepco Special Edition of my newsletter.
No comments:
Post a Comment