MIAMI, FL -- Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) was named the winner of the 2015 ReliabilityOne National Reliability Excellence Award by PA Consulting Group, an international firm that analyzes electric utility performance across the United States.
"We appreciate this honor, which recognizes FPL as the most reliable electric utility in the nation," said Eric Silagy, president and chief executive officer of FPL. "This award is a direct reflection of the commitment of our employees, who each and every day deliver outstanding value for our customers. We are constantly working to improve our service by investing in innovative technology that makes our grid stronger, smarter and more resilient, particularly where it concerns Florida's severe weather. These investments, which we began following Hurricane Wilma a decade ago, total more than $2 billion, and have positioned FPL to deliver electric service that today is more than 99.98 percent reliable. And we are not stopping there. Our investments to modernize Florida's electric grid will help us meet the needs of our customers, both residential and business, now and in the future."
Since 2006, FPL has invested more than $2 billion to strengthen their system and their customers are seeing the benefits. FPL has improved service reliability by approximately 20 percent in the last five years and is on track to achieve its best ever performance record in 2015. The company attributes these accomplishments and this prestigious national award to its nearly 9,000 employees who are committed to delivering value to customers by continuously improving one of the most advanced electric grids in the nation, including:
•Strengthening nearly 600 main power lines (feeders) serving key community facilities, including hospitals, police and fire stations, 911 communication centers
•Clearing vegetation from 120,000 miles of power lines
•Inspecting 1.2 million utility poles, restoring or replacing those that no longer met FPL's standards for strength
•Installing advanced smart grid and cutting-edge technologies – including 4.8 million smart meters and more than 12,000 other intelligent devices – to reduce power outages and provide customers with unprecedented information to manage their energy use
The ReliabilityOne National Reliability Excellence Award is given to the regional award recipient that has demonstrated sustained leadership, innovation and achievement in the area of electric reliability. FPL received the ReliabilityOne™ Award for Outstanding Reliability Performance in the Southeast region of the U.S., making the company eligible for the national award. FPL was also awarded Outstanding Technology and Innovation in the U.S. and Outstanding Personal Achievement, for FPL engineer Jorge Valdes, an expert in underground cable design and operations. The selection criteria for the ReliabilityOne National Reliability Excellence Award are both quantitative and qualitative including:
•superior regional performance
•sustained performance over time
•improved performance over time
•leadership in outage data collection and reporting systems, processes, procedures and controls
•organizational and cultural focus on reliability
•communication, planning, preparation, and response to major outage events
•contributions to regional system security and reliability
The ReliabilityOne award is given annually to utilities that have excelled in delivering reliable electric service to their customers. All utilities operating electric delivery networks in North America are eligible for consideration for the ReliabilityOne™ award. Selection of provisional recipients is based primarily on system reliability statistics that measure the frequency and duration of customer outages. After provisional recipients are selected, each company undergoes an on-site certification process, which provides an independent review and confirmation of the policies, processes and systems used to collect, analyze and report a company's reliability results.
"Now in its 15th year, the ReliabilityOne™ Awards have helped bring recognition to those utilities that have maintained the highest level of reliability, brought outstanding innovation to their operations and placed the highest value on their customers," said Jeff Lewis, PA Consulting Group's ReliabilityOne™ Program Director. "This year Florida Power & Light Company truly embodies the best of this tradition by demonstrating exceptional leadership in customer engagement, reliability and innovation."
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