ComEd’s growing responsibility, accountability

In the wake of ComEd’s presentation to Buffalo Grove village trustees this week about plans to improve service, the ring of one comment in particular just won’t go away. “It’s unfortunate that it took this substantial incident to call your attention to the ongoing problems of this area,” said Buffalo Grove Trustee Jeffrey Berman.

The correction plan that ComEd laid out for the Buffalo Grove area — including more lightning protection, better outage detection and other measures — seems reasonable enough. Yet, with company officials unable to isolate a more certain cause for the area’s problems than the capricious luck of numerous lightning strikes, their most practical immediate response may have been the promises to improve the way ComEd reports restoration activities both to municipalities and to customers who have lost power.

In a media briefing on Thursday, top ComEd officials emphasized the new performance standards the company will be expected to meet under terms of legislation authorizing annual rate increase reviews. The plan also requires a major investment in so-called smart grid technology designed, among other things, to improve ComEd’s response to outages. These measures, if faithfully applied, surely will help.

Buffalo Grove, keep in mind, is not the only suburban community to have been hit hard by weather-related disruptions this summer or last. The litany — Carol Stream, Glendale Heights, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Rolling Meadows and more — reads like a Google map of the region. ComEd generally hails the smart grid as one its best weapons against the unpredictable, and officials emphasized Thursday that their reliability metrics lay out expectations for “pocket outages” like those experienced in suburban communities.

But smart grid technology will not head off all problems and it’s not going to be fully in place for years. So, in the meantime, it is critical that ComEd concentrate on broad planning for the unexpected and good old-fashioned customer service.

Company officials told Buffalo Grove they plan to add phone lines to their call center and improve internal communications so they can provide more authoritative, more up-to-date information about the progress of restoring disrupted service. Again good, so far as it goes, but the utility has so much further to go.

Officials seem sincere in their commitment to bridge that distance with the new metrics governing their rate structures and the advantages of smart grid. If they add effective communications to the mix and continue a comprehensive review both of regions that experience prolonged problems and those in danger of that, it will go a long way toward restoring public confidence that they are not managing by crisis.

Communities ought not be left to wonder, in the logical follow-up to Berman’s comment, what other area is waiting for a “substantial incident” to get ComEd’s attention.