SCE: aging circuits mean outages vary widely within city
Electric power infrastructure upgrades have made significant improvements in portions of the city, but other areas remain far behind, exposing Manhattan Beach residents to outages of widely differing frequency and duration, utility officials reported earlier this month.
Representatives from Southern California Edison appeared before the City Council two weeks ago to offer an update on power reliability. Francisco Martinez, a government representative for the utility, said outage duration for Manhattan, which had been above Edison’s system-wide average since at least 2013, had fallen below the mean in 2016. In 2015, Manhattan suffered an average of 189.5 minutes of sustained interruptions, while the system-wide average was 114.8 minutes. In 2016, those figures were 117.9 minutes and 134.5 minutes, respectively.
Mayor David Lesser noted that while the city as a whole had measured improvements, they masked a disproportionate number of outages experienced by some neighborhoods. Lesser said that areas served by five circuits, in particular, had gotten worse over the 2013 to 2016 period.
“This explains why there is such a — excuse the pun — a disconnect,” Lesser said. “This is why some residents report they just can’t believe how bad the service is, given the value of their homes. They feel there is more reliable service in third-world countries. And many other residents just don’t understand what the problem is because they have regular service.”
Martinez blamed aging infrastructure.
The city is covered by 16 different circuits, of different ages and different states of maintenance. The circuits also serve different numbers of customers. The Keats circuit, for example, serves only 159 customers, while the Piston circuit serves 4,348.
Martinez said Edison is in the midst of a plan to replace older circuits, including the sprawling Grizzly circuit that serves Manhattan Village, Manhattan Heights and portions of the tree section, which experienced outages in 2016. Ryan Barfield, a senior planner for Edison’s South Bay district, said the utility is adding radio controlled switches and other new equipment there that will identify circuit failures more quickly, and bring up load for the circuit to make outages less likely to occur.
The downtown-serving Piston circuit will see repairs in 2018.
A string of outages in 2013 prompted then-state Senator Ted Lieu to write SCE demanding infrastructure improvements. In 2015, continued outages revived South Bay support for a bill in the state legislature that would have set standards for outage frequency and duration, and penalized utilities that failed to meet them.
Although the council expressed appreciation the current upgrades, memories of SCE’s previous unresponsiveness remained fresh in their minds Tuesday.
“Where we were four years ago was unacceptable. Edison had funds but had not been applying them, and we had to escalate [our concerns] to higher elected officials and the utilities commission, to tell them how far below the level of service Manhattan Beach had been for many residents,” Mayor pro tem Amy Howorth told the Edison representatives.