Technology Corridor

What made BG&E's system more reliable than Pepco's?

Reliability and customer information systems (CIS) are rarely mentioned in the same breath. After all, utilities spend millions on their outage management systems to help ensure reliability. But in the wake of Hurricane Isabel last fall, the CIS at Baltimore Gas and Electric (BG&E) gets kudos for helping the utility keep on top of a widespread outage.

Although BG&E sang the praises of its customer system after the hurricane, neighboring Pepco was left cursing its new system while explaining to regulators and the press why it notified hundreds of customers that their power was restored when it wasn't.

In many ways, the different experiences of the two utilities offer an object lesson in how the humble CIS can make a mighty difference in recovering from a major outage.

"Our [CIS] performed magnificently during the hurricane," crows Tom Pelligrini, director of customer care at BG&E. The company handled more than 700,000 calls during Hurricane Isabel, with three quarters of the utility's customers without power at the height of the outage. In sharp contrast, he notes, was the company's performance during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, during which BG&E processed around 200,000 calls. That low number was due to a limited number of available telephone trunk lines, Pelligrini says. Regardless of the cause, he characterizes the company's service then as "horrendous."

Between 1999 and 2003, BG&E installed several upgrades to its CIS, and it seems to have paid off for the company. Yet in the same time span, Pepco purchased a $10 million CIS that seemingly led to several embarrassments for the company during Hurricane Isabel, including: