Significant decreases in nearly every recorded category, from total outages to impacted customer hours, illustrate a strong year for Grays Harbor PUD system reliability in 2023, the Washington State public power utility reported on April 15.
In a recent report to the utility’s Board of Commissioners, it was revealed that in 2023, the utility responded to 230 outage events and that total customers impacted ended the
Accompanying a decrease in the number of outages and impacted customers, is a drop in the number of hours customers were without power. In 2022, thanks to a number of outage events that impacted larger areas and took longer to repair, total customer hours jumped to over 626,000. In 2023, that number plummeted to 193,991, 80% of which occurred during 17 large outage events.
“In 2022, we saw a jump in the number of ‘major outage events’ that impacted the PUD’s reliability numbers,” said Engineering Director Tyson Reeves. “I think 2023 was a far more typical year for the PUD. We had a number of storms in the fall and winter and few car versus pole accidents, but nothing more than we would expect.”
In terms of the most impacted areas, the circuits serving the North Beach area of Grays Harbor, including Copalis, Moclips and Taholah, suffered the most customer hours without power, while fallen trees and storms continued to be the main outage threat. In all, over 70% of the outages and 72% of the customer hours without power were storm or tree related, while failure of utility equipment resulted in just 72 outages, down from 76 in 2022.
