CoServ earns best reliability score in its history

Planning, hard work and attention to detail culminated in CoServ’s best reliability score in the co-op’s 88-year history. For 2024, CoServ’s SAIDI score was 22.6, which means the average Member was without power for just under 23 minutes in 2024. That’s almost nine points better than 2023!

As in past years, CoServ Members had safe and reliable electricity 99.99% of the time, according to CoServ’s 2024 outage metrics.

Utilities are graded on reliability using the SAIDI (System Average Interruption Index) score, which measures how many meters were off and for how long. The lower the score, the better.

Reliability is a point of pride across all departments at CoServ.

“Our infrastructure is designed to be more robust by CoServ Engineers, built to specific standards by Project Managers, professionally maintained by our Electric Linemen and routinely inspected by our Power Quality Specialists,” said Perry Ancell, System Operations Manager.

Some of the biggest improvements came by reducing the number of circuit outages from 97 in 2023 to 39 in 2024. Drone inspections and preventative maintenance like tree trimming prevented many of these outages from happening.

New smart grid technology allows CoServ’s System Operators to identify the source of an outage faster and reroute power remotely, restoring power within minutes rather than hours. Even a quick outage where the lights blink once or twice is investigated.

“They get taken care of before we have a big outage,” Perry said. “We’ll usually send a linemen crew out when it blinks. If they don’t find anything, I’ll assign our Power Quality drone pilots to find the problem.”

If you add up all the minutes of the year – 2024 was a leap year with 366 days – and consider the average time a Member was without power, CoServ had 99.99% reliability.

SAIDI scores are a national standard and CoServ has historically had one of the best scores in the country.

“Our dedication and professionalism are reflected in the SAIDI score and that separates us from other utilities,” Perry said.