Back in 2011, storms knocked out power to over 2.8 million ComEd customers. The average time to recover from the outage was 366 minutes.

Since then, ComEd spent over $2.6 Billion on its SmartGrid, an effort to bolster the resilience of the grid and its ability to recover from an outage.

Has it worked?

From 2012 through 2017, 19 storms have caused outages. The time to recover was 116 minutes.

To save 250 minutes of outage time, ComEd spent $10.4 million per minute. Yes, $10,400,000/minute.

ComEd is a monopoly, regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), which is entitled to recover expenditures that are prudently incurred to provide the essential service of electricity. Approved expenditures, like the SmartGrid, earn money because it was approved by the legislators (not the ICC) BEFORE it was even used. A utility like ComEd earns a guaranteed rate of return on money spent and approved.

No one likes to sit in the dark but, the saving of roughly 2 hours-per-outage recovery for $10.4 million is not prudent or cost effective, except to earn ComEd money.

Realgy Energy Services is a registered Retail Energy Marketer in the states of Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. We offer Service Plans that will provide electric and natural gas at wholesale pricing direct to customers without any utility markup. Our Service Plans work with the local utility to provide seamless service and annual energy savings. Service Plans include Guaranteed SavingsTM, ManagedPriceTM, ManagedGreenTM Index, Fixed and PriceAssuranceTM.

Realgy owns and operates 7 solar plants in Illinois and is looking to invest in additional locations.

Additional Information:
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/utilities/what-have-you-been-getting-all-your-comed-rate-hikes