Recently, Village officials met with ComEd to discuss the past year’s power reliability in the Village. We experience the same outages and power flickers that our residents do, and addressing this issue is a critical concern for our community. We are pleased to note that the average length of power outages in the community has decreased over the past three years. In 2017, we averaged 207 minutes of power outages, which reduced slightly to 183 minutes in 2018, and reduced greatly to 98 minutes in 2019. The reduction in total outage time is based upon improvements that ComEd made in area switching capabilities, which allows them to restore power more quickly in the event of an outage. The Village is served by a largely "rural" power system, with 2 main power supplies feeding the entire community.
ComEd’s decisions on what systems require improvements and where enhancements should be made are based upon electrical demand (i.e. areas that are growing and need more power), as well as outage statistics. However, it is critical to note that ComEd’s outage statistics do not track power outages lasting less than a few minutes. If you experience a brief outage and power is restored quickly, or if you experience a power flicker, those are not tracked by ComEd. Because they are not tracked, it means that ComEd does not plan for system upgrades to address these issues.
This is a critical area where we need resident help. If you make a report of power outages to ComEd, you report of an outage is logged and becomes part of their reliability data. Even if an outage is only brief, it will be logged in their system and can help trigger additional upgrades to our local power grid, which can help make our electrical power more consistent. Reporting an outage is very, very simple, and there are multiple channels for it:
Again, every time a resident reports an outage or power flicker, it is recorded by ComEd and is used as data to determine if additional upgrades are necessary. When we have brief outages and they go unreported, ComEd does not track this data, and no improvements will be made. It takes reports from residents to trigger change (and reporting is as simple as texting OUT to 26633).
Please do not report the outages to the Village. We are aware of them (we experience them too), and we do not have a way of forwarding on your reports; for ComEd to track them, the outage reports must come from residents.
Thank you!