Exploring the Reliability of U.S. Electric Utilities

The purpose of this paper is to build on previous research (Eto et al. 2012) by using more comprehensive econometric analysis techniques to evaluate the long-term reliability of U.S. electric utilities.  This analysis explores a range of factors which are correlated with reliability in order to answer the following questions: (1) Are there utility-specific differences in reported electricity reliability?; (2) How is reliability affected by the installation or upgrade of an automated outage management system (OMS)?; (3) Are deviations in annual sales correlated with changes in utility reliability?; (4) How do basic weather observations affect the frequency and duration of system outages?; (5) How do annual transmission and distribution expenditures affect the frequency and duration of system outages?; (6) Do utilities that follow IEEE-recommended reliability data reporting standards report significantly different reliability from those who do not follow IEEE data reporting standards?; and (7) Are there unexplained trends in reported electricity reliability over time?