Efforts in Oregon
The Oregon Public Utility Commission (PUC) has long collected reliability data from its investor-owned utilities (IOUs), namely Portland General Electric (PGE), Pacific Power, and Idaho Power. The requirements for electric reliability data collection and reporting are contained in
Oregon Administrative Rules (OARs) 860-023-0081 through -0161. On an annual basis the utilities file these reports, which include details as required in
OAR 860-023-0151.
The utilities’ reliability reports can be viewed within the following dockets.
- RE 113 - PGE Annual Reliability Report
- RE 171 – Pacific Power Annual Reliability Report
- RE 90 – Idaho Power Annual Reliability Report
Further, when extreme weather or other large and impactful events occur, the IOUs are required to provide “major event reports”, within 30 business days, and provide information about those events, related to how many customers were out of service at key times during the event, how many crews were required, the triggering event and experiences with restoration, which are outlined in
OAR 860-023-0161.
The utilities’ major event reports can be viewed within these dockets.
- RE 112 - PGE Major Storm Event Reporting
- RE 107 – Pacific Power Major Event Report
- RE 114 – Idaho Power Major Event Days
In addition, recent focus on resilience has heightened the importance of communities also being informed about reliability and resilience of utility services. As result of House Bill 2021, the PUC was responsible for setting guidelines and standards based on industry practices for resilience that could be used to inform clean energy plans. During the PUC’s investigation into clean energy plans in docket UM 2225, many stakeholders commented on how important resilience was to the work initiated by policymakers in this bill.
The investigation included the following:
This work was prepared within the investigation as shown below.
The PUC is interested in leveraging the learnings from this investigation. The immediate goal was to create greater transparency about the causes of outages and the efforts taken by the utilities to recover from them. Further, as part of this process, the PUC is seeking broad public engagement to identify issues of concern and receive feedback on potential resilience opportunities.
Major Event Discussions
The PUC convened stakeholders and utilities to explore experiences of “resilience events” which focused on major events that resulted in support via the states’ Emergency Support Function (ESF)-12 that supports energy infrastructure. View the recordings and links below for additional information.
Session 1 – February 8, 2023, as follow-up to extreme winter weather events in December 2022.