Celebrating a century of reliability and innovation
You rely on PPL Electric Utilities to deliver the electricity that powers your lives and businesses. Since our founding in 1920 we’ve taken that responsibility seriously. PPL has been focused on keeping the lights on for you. We’ve worked to stay on the leading edge of the utility industry, innovating and improving our electric grid to provide safe, reliable electricity across our service territory.
Now, as we celebrate our centennial, we remain one of the most reliable utilities in the country.
- Each year, we invest in our delivery system. We’re continuously performing proactive maintenance, replacing aging equipment and developing solutions to safeguard the grid. As a result of that work, overall power outages are down 30% compared to 2011.
- We have more than 5,300 miles of transmission lines. Since 2013, through investments and innovation, we’ve reduced transmission outages by 75%, and we’ve decreased transmission outages caused by lightning by 67%.
- For the past three years, our customers had electricity 99.99% of the time.
This performance – along with our commitments to customer service, safety and our communities – has helped us earn eight consecutive J.D. Power residential customer satisfaction awards for large electric utilities in the eastern U.S.
A century of work by thousands of dedicated PPL employees has gotten us to this point, but we have much more to do. We’re evolving to meet the changing needs of our customers and to shape the reliable utility of the future. We’re making the grid smarter, safer and better equipped to handle the next generation of renewable energy. Plus, we’ve embarked upon a digital transformation that will revolutionize the way we engage with our customers in the years to come.
The utility industry is changing fast, but our commitment to providing reliable electricity remains unchanged. We delivered in 1920, we deliver in 2020, and we’re committed to delivering for you long into the future.
Thank you for allowing us to serve you every day. We look forward to celebrating our 100th anniversary with you throughout the year.
Greg Dudkin
President, PPL Electric Utilities
Dear Mr. Dudkin:
As a PP&L customer, I appreciate your centennial anniversary message, emphasizing the reliability improvements in the grid. However in this age of terrorism and radical individualistic behavior, I am concerned and wonder what improvements has PP&L made in the physical security of the system controls, generating, and transmission equipment as well as in cyber security. Perhaps a followup message in this regard would alleviate customer anxiety about the state of readiness to prevent critical long term power outages caused by deliberate acts of sabotage. Thank you.
Joseph J. Dougherty
Good Afternoon Joseph,
We appreciate your interest & feedback! Cyber and physical security around the power grid is an area of focus for both PPL & the entire electric utility industry. We take it seriously and continue to make improvements to help keep our facilities and operations safe, secure and reliable. In addition, we do things like participate in nationwide drills to test our readiness to respond to physical and cyber threats.
We’ll escalate your suggestion and consider a follow-up message at some point. Thanks again!
I read with interest Mr. Dudkin’s message about “Celebrating a century of reliability and innovation” only to feel deceived.
I have always felt that data could be filtered to make things look good. For example, the statement “power outages are down 30% compared to 2011” does not state the comparison year. Additionally, 2011 might have been a particularly bad year. Same goes for the reduced transmission outages in the next bullet item which uses a different base year, 2013. I wonder why the different year. And finally, the last item only uses the last 3 years! How many outages is that and what is the average downtime? Since some % of customers might never have a power outage, the data might skew the results.That might be a good positive metric.
I look forward to a more complete picture.
Thank you for your comments. The statistics we cite are representative of a decade-long trend of increasingly improved reliability across our 10,000-square-mile service area in central and eastern Pennsylvania. Things like replacing aging equipment and using smart grid technology place us in the top quartile in the nation in reliability when compared to our peers. Keeping your lights on is our priority, and we work on improving each day because we know our customers depend on us. We’ll be sure to keep communicating our reliability performance. Thanks again for your suggestion!