The Perils of Reliability Benchmarking

Reliability benchmarking is here to stay. It does not matter whether a utility participates in benchmarking or not; they will be compared to benchmarking data regardless. Utilities may as well participate in benchmark surveys so that they can better understand how all of the various factors addressed in this article apply to each survey, helping to avoid improper interpretations by others. More importantly, participation in benchmark surveys helps utilities engage in dialogue with one another about deeper and more substantial reliability issues. How is aging infrastructure affecting reliability and what are you doing about it? What reliability benefits do you expect from your Smart Grid initiatives? Has anyone tried thisor-that new technology? What happened to your reliability indices when you upgraded your outage management system? How are you prioritizing cable replacement? How do you balance spending on reliability index improvement versus worst-performing circuits? How do you set internal reliability targets? And so forth. Hopefully, quartile results are only a small sliver of benchmarking results, and will be de-emphasized as much as possible. In the end, reliability benchmarking tends to guide reliability index expectations, often leading to reliability improvement targets. This puts a utility in an undesirable position. It is very possible that benchmarking-based targets could result in targets that are not cost-effective and may not even be achievable.