Ohio grid disparities leave some areas with older, outage-prone equipment

Yahoo

17-04-2025

Ohio consumer and environmental advocates are calling on state regulators to address disparities within FirstEnergy's grid after a recent report found disadvantaged communities are more likely to rely on older, more outage-prone equipment.
Areas defined as disadvantaged under the Biden administration's Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool were twice as likely to have low-voltage circuits compared to other parts of FirstEnergy's Ohio territory, according to the study by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Equipment was also generally older and had less capacity for normal and overload situations.
The results reflect historical patterns of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities, the report says, but the full scope of the problem — including across Ohio's other utilities — is unclear due to the lack of information from utilities and regulators.
'The public availability of any utility data is very, very limited in Ohio,' said report author Shay Banton, a regulatory program engineer and energy justice policy advocate for the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
The Ohio Environmental Council submitted the report as part of FirstEnergy's pending rate case before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and is asking regulators to address the topic in an evidentiary hearing set for May 5.
The state of the local grid matters when it comes to the reliability of customers' electric service, their ability to add distributed renewable energy resources like rooftop solar, and a community's potential to attract business investments that could improve its economic conditions.
Regulated electric utilities file reliability reports each spring that focus on two commonly used metrics. The system average interruption frequency index, or SAIFI, shows how many outages occurred per customer. The customer average interruption duration index, or CAIDI, measures the average length of time for restoring service to customers who lose power.
The annual reports also list factors involved in outages, with breakouts for transmission-related service problems and major events. Major events such as severe weather are considered statistical outliers that don't count for calculating whether utilities meet their company-specific standards for CAIDI and SAIFI.
While weather accounted for the majority of time Ohioans went without power last year, equipment failures also triggered thousands of outages. For the ninth year in a row, at least one Ohio utility company failed to meet reliability standards, reports filed this month show. Both AEP Ohio and FirstEnergy's Toledo Edison missed their marks for the average time before power is restored for customers who experience outages.
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio also collects data on the worst-performing circuits. Individual circuits serve anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand customers. However, the state doesn't post these reports online or disclose the circuit's exact locations, which could be used to show whether they are concentrated in disadvantaged communities.
The SAIFI and CAIDI metrics used by state regulators did not show significant disparities between disadvantaged neighborhoods and other areas in FirstEnergy's territory. But Banton said those reliability metrics rely on averages for large groups, which can obscure disparities. They said that utilities should also be required to publicly report the number of customers experiencing frequent service interruptions and the number of customers who faced long outages.
Utilities in Ohio tend to be reactive in dealing with circuit problems, Banton said. Communities can face longer outages if utilities wait for equipment to fail before replacing it. Instead, Banton wants utilities' capital investments to address current disparities and then prevent them from recurring in the future.
'The bottom line is that consumers should get reliable service, and utilities are obligated to provide reliable service,' said Merrilee Embs, a spokesperson for the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, which did not work on the report. The group is concerned about whether utilities' capital improvement spending directly benefits customers — an issue that relates to grid disparities.
'FirstEnergy's (and other Ohio utilities') failure to implement grid modernization plans in a way that benefits residential consumers likely contributes to grid disparities such as those described in the [study],' Embs wrote via email after reviewing the report.
FirstEnergy has challenged the Ohio Environmental Council's objections about grid disparities in its rate case. Meanwhile, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio is due to consider revisions to the annual reliability reporting requirements by Sept. 30, 2026. The commission will likely start accepting comments on the rules later this year, said spokesperson Matt Schilling.
The quality of a neighborhood's grid influences more than whether residents' lights stay on.
'These inequities can have serious consequences for customer access to distributed energy resources, which can save money,' said Karin Nordstrom, a lawyer for the Ohio Environmental Council.
Rooftop solar or other distributed clean energy can add to traffic on local grid circuits, posing a challenge for equipment that's older or has lower voltages or capacity. Those circuits generally can handle less grid traffic, Banton said. In contrast, newer, high-voltage circuits tend to have 'less bumps and less potholes [along with] better on-ramps.'
The grid's quality and capacity also impact an area's economic development. Historically, utilities have focused capital investment on places where people are moving or where they expect new industrial demand. That approach exacerbates inequity, Banton said. Even if businesses otherwise wanted to move to disadvantaged areas, poor electrical infrastructure may lead them to go elsewhere to avoid huge costs for upgrading the local grid, they said.
'The energy transition is in full effect, but many of the communities that suffer first and worst from climate change are not able to make the transition due to underinvestment in infrastructure,' said Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, who did not work on the new report. He served at the U.S. Department of Energy as deputy director for energy justice and principal deputy director for state and community energy programs during the Biden administration.
Because utilities have failed to invest in and maintain the grid evenly throughout their service territories, an equity-based approach to infrastructure modernization should make sure resources now go to areas that were left behind, Reames said.
He supports the report's call for more granular data, including details on customers with repeated or prolonged outages. The report also calls on utilities to publish maps showing grid capacity, and information about which census tracts are served by each circuit and substation transformers.
'I often say, 'The data you don't have is the problem you don't see,'' Reames noted. 'Difficulties accessing data or the lack of certain data availability are sometimes a result of entities not wanting to confirm issues that are anecdotally known.'
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