After a recent Town Hall Meeting on power outages, I feel that there is a very justified need for independent audits of the totally unregulated electric utility company known as Detroit Edison.

My question is this: Is there an excellent model of an independent audit program for Y2K? Where is it at and who could I contact? I know of a Michigan Senator who is willing to consider legislation that would mandate an audit program of this and other utilities.

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Jeff

-- Anonymous, June 29, 1998

Answers

I can understand both your frustration and your concern. However, I would like to provide you with a few options.

First Detroit Edison is a regulated utility. It is regulated by a number of agencies. It is regulated by the Michigan Public Services Commission, by the National Electric Reliability Council, and by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and others.

In my reading of your post you raise two issues. The first is that reliability is not so good (otherwise why have a townhall meeting on it.) The second has to do with y2k audits. These are two different areas of concern for a customer of Detroit Edison.

First on determining if your area has a reliability problem there are a few things I would suggest doing. I would call Detroit Edison, if I were you and ask to speak to someone in "Power System Planning," "Transmission Engineering" or "Power Planning" Try them in the order listed. I would ask the person you are connected to at Detroit Edison to provide you with System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) and System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) values for the entire Detroit Edison System and for the "components" that impact power to you and your community (i.e. the local substations that serve the town--if they record information that way). If you are nice to the person, they will probably tell you what they have, as these are industry standard types of reliability statistics. They may have some adjustments such as non-storm SAIDI and SAIFI values, but that is OK. Then when armed with this information call the Michigan PUC and ask someone in the electric power area what the PUC considers to be acceptable SAIDI and SAIFI values. If they don't have any, ask why the state isn't concerned about insuring reliable power supply or how the state intends to do that. If you feel energetic, call a number of utilities and get their SAIDI and SAIFI values and compare the values of DE to see if it is really much worse or not. You should try to get the values from all utilities for the most recent 5 year period. That should tell you if you have a complaint. Document what you do and then send a letter off as a formal complaint to the head of the Public Utliity Commission, indicating why you feel you deserve better, more reliable power. Most utilities try to provide reliable power, some are really hard pressed right now and cutting corners on maintenance expenses that are resulting in higher than historic power outages. If that is the case at your utility, the statistics should prove the point. Conversely, your area could have had bad luck with a few explainable reasons for power outages.

Now on to your second topic, which is y2k Audits models. There is a suggested letter to be sent to utilities in the Cassandra project info and a "survey form" in this website, those would be the basis of a good initial inquiry. There are also some utility responses within the "links area" of this website, that provide good models of how to implement a y2k compliance program.

In summary, your utility is regulated (maybe not as well or directly as you would like) and you can influence that regulation (and the utility) with well documented correspondence to the regulatory body. I feel I have made a difference in power reliability in my state, by my testimony before a utility commission hearing to get SAIDI and SAIFI statistics included within "performance based" rates of an investor owned utility. This puts financial pressure on the utlity to keep its reliability statistics up or loose money for stockholders. Investor owned utlities don't like to tell stockholders that their dividends are down because the utility didn't keep the power flowing to its customers, as it sounds like inefficient management.

Good Luck.

Bob Schneider

-- Anonymous, July 16, 1998