Owners of Electric Distribution Systems and Gas Distributors Service Quality and Reliability Performance Plans and Reports:

Archived Reports

Owners of electric utilities have always been required to provide safe and adequate service. With the proclamation of the new Electric Utilities Act, S.A. 2003, on June 1, 2003, the AUC’s predecessor, the EUB, gained the legislative authority to make and enforce rules respecting service quality standards. The legislation also authorizes the AUC to impose penalties on utilities and regulated rate providers and to require the payment of credits to customers as compensation for the utilities' failure to meet the rules respecting service quality standards.

In response to this new legislative authority, the EUB took steps to ensure the continued provision of high-quality customer service to customers receiving electricity services from Wire Owners. First, the EUB developed and introduced a draft service quality plan. The plan included requirements to report statistics on important components of distribution system reliability, worker safety and meter reading.

Working through a collaborative process, the EUB then invited stakeholders to provide feedback to the EUB on its proposed service quality plan. The EUB met with stakeholders in a series of meetings and developed the initial performance measures and performance monitoring and reporting requirements.

The AUC issued Rule 002: Electric Distribution System Owner Service Quality and Reliability Performance, Monitoring and Reporting Rules, which set out the standards by which the Wire Owner's performance will be measured. It requires the Wire Owners to monitor and report the results of its performance in these areas. Given that detailed benchmarking information had not been universally available prior to the issuance of Directive 002, the standards outlined in the plans did not immediately attract penalties for nonperformance.

The AUC believes that the Service Quality and Reliability Plans will provide benefits to ratepayers. These benefits include:

• more comprehensive service monitoring;
• supplying public information on the level of service a company is providing; and
• the establishment of a database from which to set future utility performance targets.

While the AUC considers the current reporting requirements and standards to be reasonable as initial measures, it will review the standards after a year's supply of data is available to ensure that the benchmarks established continue to remain fair and appropriate. Through another round of consultative process with stakeholders, the AUC will analyze the data received and revise, if necessary, the quality of service benchmarks and standards for the Wire Owners. In addition, the AUC will periodically review the standards and levels of performance to determine the appropriateness of introducing penalties for noncompliance.

For the 2007 reporting year, the EUB made the following changes to Rule 002:

• The standard regarding meter reading performance has been temporarily suspended.
• The standard regarding work completion performance has been temporarily suspended.
• The requirement to conduct an overall satisfaction survey has been deleted.
  

In early 2006, the Electricity Branch of the Department of Energy announced that the rule-making responsibility for the Settlement System Code (SSC) would be moving to the EUB, the AUC's predecessor, from the Alberta Electric System Operator. The initial standards for two performance metrics (i.e., meter reading and work completion) were adopted from the performance standards contained in the SSC in order to be consistent with the current reporting practice of the industry.  However, the SSC standard for the work completion performance metric was a suggested target only and not a mandatory requirement.  In addition, the standard adopted for the meter reading performance metric is only one of the five standards in place in the SSC for cumulative meter data performance metrics.  On its own, the meter reading standard was providing an incomplete depiction of the performance of the Wire Owners with respect to data collection. With the rule-making transition under way, the AUC will take the opportunity to engage interested stakeholders and Wire Owners in establishing the appropriate standards for the meter reading and work completion performance metrics. In the meantime, the existing standards will be temporarily suspended.

The requirement to conduct an overall satisfaction survey has been deleted. The AUC considered the information being provided in the transactional survey to be a more meaningful and relevant measure of a Wire Owner performance than the information provided through an overall satisfaction survey.