Reliable power is something you should be able to count on.
At GEA, we work every day to provide safe, reliable electric service to the communities we serve. One way we measure how well we are doing that is through system availability, which looks at how much of the time our electric system was available to serve customers.
For July, our average system availability was 99.960%.
That means that, across the entire month, our system was available to supply power to the average customer 99.960% of the time.
What does 99.960% actually mean?
July has 744 hours. At 99.960% availability, that translates to approximately 17 minutes and 51 seconds of downtime for the average customer during the entire month.
And there is an important distinction to make: that does not mean every customer was without power for 17 minutes and 51 seconds.
This is a systemwide average. Some customers experienced an outage during July, while many customers experienced no outage at all.
Electric utilities commonly use reliability measurements to evaluate how frequently and how long customers experience interruptions. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, for example, uses industry reliability metrics such as SAIDI and SAIFI to measure interruption duration and frequency.
Why we share this number
Reliability can sometimes be something you don’t think about until the power goes out. Behind the scenes, our crews and system operators are constantly working to maintain equipment, respond to problems and keep our electrical system operating reliably.
Our July availability of 99.960% is one way we can show our customers how our system performed during the month.
We know that even a short outage can be an inconvenience, and our goal is always to provide the most reliable service possible.
Thank you for trusting GEA to power your home, business and community.
System availability is an average systemwide measurement and does not represent the outage experience of every individual customer. Individual outage times can vary based on location, cause and circumstances of an interruption.