WV has highest outage rate in US after winter storm in latest reliability letdown

Most of the outages are in the territory of Appalachian Power, which has struggled to meet electric reliability targets and has been one of the nation’s worst performers in electric power outage duration in recent years.

Appalachian Power on Tuesday evening reported 19,100 outages persisting in West Virginia, with restoration for most areas not expected until Wednesday at 8 p.m. — including nearly 4,800 outages in the ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä area.

The region is expected to have little recovery time, with more snowfall from another storm cycle expected this weekend.

In West Virginia, 2.74% of customers — 27,561 out of 1,006,909 — were without power as of 3:17 p.m. Tuesday, according to an outage map published by Generac Power Systems, a backup power generator manufacturer. The state with the next-highest percentage of customers without power was Virginia with 1.05%. West Virginia’s percentage of customers without power had been 3.27% just before 11 a.m. Tuesday.

Appalachian Power customers had most of the outages in both states — 93.5% in West Virginia, 96.5% in Virginia as of Tuesday afternoon.

West Virginia had nearly 7,000 more outages than Kentucky late Tuesday morning despite the latter state having more than double West Virginia’s number of customers.

As of 3:24 p.m. Tuesday, Mercer, Lincoln and Summers counties had the highest outage percentages in West Virginia at 27.5%, 23.1% and 15%, respectively, per PowerOutage.us data.

PSC staff: APCo electric reliability ‘unreasonable’

Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power have struggled consistently with disproportionately frequent and long-lasting outages, failing to meet electric reliability targets set by the West Virginia Public Service Commission.

A 2022 review of electric utility performance nationwide ranked West Virginia dead last among all states in overall utility performance. The report found Mountain Staters had to endure the country’s worst performance in metrics measuring average duration of power outages and average time to restore power per customer. The review published by the Citizens Utility Board of Illinois, a consumer advocate group, found West Virginia had the nation’s second-worst average frequency of power outages, ahead of only Alaska.

Appalachian Power’s West Virginia coverage area ranked in the highest 6% of all 967 listed utilities nationwide in outage minutes per year in 2023, according to a Gazette-Mail review of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

West Virginia Public Service Commission staff in September urged the PSC to deny an Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power request for more lenient targets in metrics measuring duration and frequency of power outages.

PSC staff noted the American Electric Power subsidiaries have routinely failed to meet even minimum reliability targets set by the agency and concluded their performance negatively impacts electric reliability compared with neighboring states.

The commission staff said it was ready to launch a general investigation into Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power reliability performance since the companies “appear to lack focus� on improvements if their reliability “remain[s] unreasonable.�

Commission staff recommended the companies be required to fill “significant� company operations staff vacancies and supply the agency a detailed breakdown of equipment-failure outages.

The recommendations followed the utilities’ PSC-required proposal filed in May for new reliability targets. The PSC has yet to make a ruling determining what the reliability targets in the still-pending case.

APCo exec laments ‘low customer density’

Jason Baker, vice president of distribution operations at Appalachian Power, said at a PSC hearing in November on Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power reliability targets that much of the companies’ system in West Virginia was built in the 1930s and 1940s to extend service to coal mines and small towns “in the most economical manner that they could at the time.�

That means, Baker added, that “there’s no real pattern� to how the companies’ system is laid out, yielding a “very long circuit, miles from coal mine to coal mine.�

“And with that, it’s a low customer density, which can make certain improvements impractical,� Baker said. “Small customer amounts, lots of money to make improvements.�

Baker noted line relocations could mitigate the reliability challenge posed by West Virginia’s mountainous terrain and that the state’s heavy forestation is another reliability obstacle.

Baker said the companies have been redesigning the distribution system, managing vegetation threatening outages and adding technology that detects an outage and automatically reroutes power.

In a winter storm response update Tuesday, Appalachian Power said it will perform repairs to restore electric service to the largest pockets of customers in the shortest amount of time. A single repair may sometimes restore service to hundreds or thousands of customers, the utility said.

Appalachian Power said its “final phase� consists of restoring power to individual homes and businesses.

“This phase of the restoration process can be time-consuming after a significant storm because there are so many of these kinds of repairs,� the company said.

Storms poised to keep costing customers more

Severe storms that wreak havoc on West Virginia’s power are becoming more common — and more costly for customers.

In a pending proposal asking the PSC to approve a $265.1 million, 15.4% increase in revenue at ratepayers’ expense, Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power said they deferred over $94 million linked to extraordinary storm restoration costs from 2019 through 2023 and an additional $23.8 million of such costs from January through May 2024 alone. The result, the utilities said, was $118 million of deferred storm costs.

Storm costs have been a “volatile� category of operations and maintenance spending, according to the companies, ranging from $16.3 million to a high of $29.2 million during a five-year period covering 2019-23.

Roughly $53 million of $118 million deferred in restoration expenses stemmed from a February 2021 ice storm that left many customers in the utilities’ western service territory without power for up to two weeks. The remainder includes storms in 2022 and 2023 as well as tornadoes that barreled through in April 2024.

Worsening climate change is causing more extreme weather patterns that result in harder-hitting storms.

Nearly a quarter of West Virginia’s billion-dollar disasters from 1980 to 2024 (11 out of 45, 24%) have come in just the last five years of that span, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

For 2023, Appalachian Power failed to meet its current optimal target for average system outage duration (in minutes per year) and both its optimal and minimum targets for customer average interruption duration (minutes per interruption).

Wheeling Power didn’t come close to meeting any of its outage duration or frequency targets.

Appalachian Power reported meeting its minimum system average duration target twice in the past five years and never meeting its optimal target for that category. The company never met either customer average interruption duration target from 2019 through 2023. Wheeling Power never met any minimum targets in the past five years.

Baker called Wheeling Power’s duration outage struggles in 2021 and 2022 “reliability anomalies driven by weather� during the PSC’s November hearing on Wheeling Power and Appalachian Power electric reliability targets.