ComEd to Host Utilities' Best Practices Conference on Storm Response

CHICAGO, Sept. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- As part of ComEd's ongoing efforts to enhance its storm restoration process, the company will host a best practices roundtable discussion Thursday and Friday in Oak Brook, to learn from the solutions that have proven effective for other utilities.

The event is designed to share best practices among leading utilities – including those recognized by the Edison Electric Institute for excellent storm response efforts – to help enhance operational performance and customer service.  The roundtable discussion goes above and beyond ComEd's internal lessons learned process. High-level discussion topics will include:

• Crew mobilization and dispatching
• Staffing and resource utilization
• Damage assessment
• Communications (including estimated times of restoration)
• Prioritization philosophy

Participating utilities will include PECO, Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE), Duke Energy, NSTAR Progress Energy, Alabama Power and We Energies.

In addition to soliciting feedback from leading utilities, ComEd already has several enhancements underway to internal processes to improve the company's storm response, including:

• Enhancing communications with customers in the aftermath of severe storms, including doubling ComEd's call center's capacity by adding 1,000 additional phone lines, providing customers with more timely and accurate information and leveraging texting and social media as other means to communicate more effectively with customers;
• Accelerating overall restoration by refining the damage assessment protocol to deploy resources where and when they're needed most; bringing a more community-based approach to prioritizing repairs by leveraging geographic efficiencies and improving coordination with municipalities to identify critical community restoration priorities and pocket reliability concerns; and,
• Working closely with municipal officials to increase customer satisfaction and to address pockets or communities not specifically targeted by the initial, broader system restoration efforts.

These efforts follow a record-breaking summer, including the most damaging storms in the company's history.  The devastating storms affected service to more than 2 million customers and cost nearly $120 million (triple the company's annual storm budget).

Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd) is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corporation (NYSE: EXC), one of the nation's largest electric utilities with approximately 5.4 million customers. ComEd provides service to approximately 3.8 million customers across Northern Illinois, or 70 percent of the state's population.

SOURCE ComEd

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