ComEd Earns National Recognition for Outstanding Emergency Response Efforts
Awards recognize ComEd’s local recovery, mutual support efforts to southern electric companies following Hurricane Ian in 2022
CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a national association that represents all American investor-owned electric companies, recognized ComEd with two awards for its outstanding emergency response efforts in 2022. The Emergency Assistance Award was presented to ComEd in recognition of its assistance efforts restoring service to homes and businesses in the South following Hurricane Ian, and the Emergency Recovery Award was presented to ComEd for its exemplary recovery efforts in response to severe thunderstorms in the Midwest last June.
“Severe weather caused by climate change continues to challenge electric companies around the world to strengthen their system resilience and response capabilities, but these challenges are no match for the hard work of ComEd’s 6,200 employees and our continued investment in the resiliency of the power grid,” said Terence R. Donnelly, ComEd president and COO. “These awards recognize the incredible efforts by thousands of ComEd employees who work year-round to maintain the power grid in northern Illinois and lend their expertise to support other utilities around the country when faced with natural disasters.”
“Throughout the past six months, electric companies faced devastating hurricanes, unprecedented heat waves, and many other extreme weather events that impacted the customers and communities we serve,” said EEI President Tom Kuhn. “I commend ComEd’s commitment to restore service for its customers safely and quickly under challenging conditions. I also applaud ComEd for aiding neighboring electric companies in their times of need. ComEd and its storm response team undoubtedly are deserving of this national recognition, and I am honored to present them with these well-deserved awards.”
EEI’s Emergency Recovery Award was earned by ComEd due to efforts in June 2022, when over 195,000 ComEd customers experienced outages due to the severe thunderstorms that hit northern Illinois. In addition to deploying crews to assess damage and quickly restore power, ComEd also deployed care vans and cooling buses throughout the region to support customers and provide hard-hit areas with additional relief during the heatwave. Thanks to the efforts of ComEd’s team and grid hardening investments, 50 percent of customers were restored within two hours of their outage, and 95 percent of customers were restored within 23 hours of their outage.
EEI’s Emergency Assistance Award was earned by ComEd due to outstanding efforts helping other utilities restore power following significant storms. Hurricane Ian left a path of destruction from Florida through the Carolinas in September 2022. In total, 4 million customers in Florida and 1 million customers throughout North and South Carolina lost power due to this storm. ComEd deployed 320 employees to support restoration efforts, providing more than 50,000 hours of assistance for five different utilities in the region.
The Emergency Assistance Award and Emergency Recovery Award are presented to select EEI member companies to recognize their extraordinary efforts to assist local utilities as they work to restore power to customers after service disruptions caused be severe weather conditions or other natural events. The winners are chosen by a panel of judges following an international nomination process, and the awards were presented during EEI’s winter Board of Directors and CEO meeting on January 11, 2023.
These awards are just the latest accolades earned by ComEd, and follow the 2022 Reliability One® Outstanding System Resiliency Award, presented to ComEd by PA Consulting in November of 2022. This award recognized the investment ComEd has made to harden its system and bring greater resiliency to customers during severe weather and other events.
ComEd is providing record-breaking reliability to the communities it serves. In 2022, more than 3.6 million of ComEd’s 4.1 million customers experienced either zero or no more than one outage. Since it began its smart grid investments, ComEd and its more than 6,200 employees have helped customers avoid nearly 19 million outages, saving more than $3 billion in outage-related costs.
ComEd is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon Corporation (NASDAQ: EXC), a Fortune 200 energy company with approximately 10 million electricity and natural gas customers – the largest number of customers in the U.S. ComEd powers the lives of more than 4 million customers across northern Illinois, or 70 percent of the state’s population. For more information visit ComEd.com, and connect with the company on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
EEI is the association that represents all U.S. investor-owned electric companies. Our members provide electricity for more than 235 million Americans, and operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. As a whole, the electric power industry supports more than 7 million jobs in communities across the United States. In addition to our U.S. members, EEI has more than 65 international electric companies, with operations in more than 90 countries, as International Members, and hundreds of industry suppliers and related organizations as Associate Members.
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