In the News

Glenview Journal, August 10, 2008

Glenview officials said a new ComEd notification system known as eOutage, designed to allow village officials to see where power outages occur so they can deploy resources, failed in its first test during severe storms last week.

Village President Kerry Cummings said that though she has seen improvement, she is still disappointed with ComEd's service.

She said, "Customers have an expectation given the immediate nature of technology."

Deputy Village Manager Chris Clark said a web-based component of the system delivered hours-old information during the storm last Monday and did not work at all on Tuesday.

Clark praised ComEd's quick response in having crews in Glenview restoring power and said he did receive e-mail notifications from ComEd alerting him to outages in Glenview but said the web-based eOutage application, set up to allow communities to pin point those outages, did not work properly.

Clark said power was lost in Glenview at 11:09 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 4. He was notified via e-mail that 734 customers on the southeast side of Glenview were without power at 1:15 a.m. By 9 a.m. Tuesday, 430 customers were still without power. By 9:30, that number dropped to 33 and by noon all had been restored.

On Tuesday at 4 p.m., an area south of East Lake Street and East of Waukegan Road lost power again and was fully restored by 7 p.m. that evening.

ComEd spokesman Joe Trost acknowledged that the system was overloaded Monday when hundreds of thousands of customers lost power in a very short time frame across northern Illinois. He said technicians are continually working to upgrade the system.

He defended criticism by Illinois State Sen. Susan Garrett (D-29th) and others that the phone systems could not give accurate restoration times to customers saying that crews needed to physically visit the site of each outage before they could estimate a restoration time.

The eOutage system was developed after severe storms and flooding in August of 2007. At the time, residents, village officials, and state legislators expressed frustration with ComEd's response.

Trost said ComEd received praise from numerous communities regarding the response to Monday's storms. He named far southwest suburban Sugar Grove as one of those communities.

Trost went on to say ComEd has spent $5 billion on infrastructure upgrades since 2001.

He delivered a great deal of information detailing ComEd's area infrastructure projects

Cummings wants to see a system that doesn't rely on people to call ComEd with information regarding an outage, but rather automatically will notify ComEd when there is an outage.

Trost said a proposal to install such a system submitted by ComEd is before the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) now.

He also said it would be expensive and would likely lead to rate increases, though before the ICC has ruled on the measure he could not estimate how much.

Trost said the Smart Grid would lead to cost reductions of $73 million as service would be much easier with the system.

Garrett was glad to hear ComEd was working on the upgrade but said, "In order to get this upgrade, ComEd is asking us to cover the cost." She said customers should not have to foot the bill for the system, "especially if long term they will realize a savings."