Power outages.
To homeowners and businesses, there might be nothing more troublesome than losing electrical power, whether it’s due to severe weather or to a traffic accident taking down a power pole.
A report filed earlier this year with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission showed an average utility customer in the state experienced an average of a little more than one outage in 2023. It was actually 1.038 outages, based on what is known as a gauge of electric service reliability called System Average Interruption Frequency Index, or SAIFI. Another gauge, SAIDI or System Average Interruption Duration Index, is the average length of time a customer loses electrical power.
The 2024 Reliability Scorecard in the Corporation Commission’s report on regulated electric utilities indicated “that customers served by Oklahoma’s regulated electric utilities were without power during 2023 for an average of approximately 152.85 minutes or 2.55 hours.
The customers of OG&E and PSO, Oklahoma’s largest electric companies, were without power in 2023 for an average of 0.94 and 1.24 times, respectively.
The report showed that customers of NOEC or Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative experienced an average of 1.68 outages a year, and “lost power more often than customers of any other regulated electric utility in Oklahoma during the past five years.”
Customers of Canadian Valley lost power the least, experiencing an average of only about 0.292 outages a year in the past five years. In the same time span, customers of regulated utilities in the state experienced 1.174 outages a year.
Focusing on outages in 2023, of the six electricity providers regulated by the Corporation Commission, Arkansas Valley customers averaged the most time without power—323.57 minutes or 5.39 hours. Liberty-Empire was second highest at 154.52 minutes or 2.58 hours. Canadian Valley customers were without power for the shortest time in 2023, an average of 68.88 minutes.
If you were a customer of OGE in 2023, you experienced an outage that lasted 130.89 minutes while those who received their electricity from PSO were in the dark 107.10 minutes.
The annual report also revealed customer trends in the electricity utilities. It indicated that the state’s largest utilities, OG&E and PSO are gaining more customers every year.
PSO went from 553,971 customers in 2019 to 570,502 customers in 2023.
OGE had 781,764 customers in 2019 and grew to 820,989 customers by 2023.
A decline was experienced by Arkansas Valley, from 5,440 customers in 2019 to 4,687 customers in 2023. Canadian Valley increased form 25,458 in 2019 to 27,406 in 2023. Customer numbers remained steady for Empire with 6,661 in 2019 and 6,655 in 2023.
NOEC reported growth too, from 40,655 in 2019 to 41,275 in 2023.