–Algona Municipal Utilities is receiving some national recognition for providing reliable electric service to area residents and businesses. The award comes from the American Public Power Association, a trade group representing over 2,000 community-owned electric utilities. AMU General Manager John Bilsten tells KLGA News that being a reliable provider of electricity is something they take great pride in at all levels.
The APPA helps electric utilities track power outages and restoration data through their eReliability Tracker service. Bilsten says this information compares AMU to other utility providers across the country.
A pair of March blizzards gave AMU a chance to see just how reliable their electric service can be during extreme weather events, and Bilsten says everything went as well as they could have hoped.
AMU has made several upgrades over recent years to help make their electric service more reliable. Bilsten says this includes things like burying transmission lines throughout town, which means they can’t be impacted by blizzards or derechos.
The Department of Energy tracks outage indices for all electric utilities across the country through a metric called System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI), which is the average duration in minutes of an interruption per customer served by a utility. The nationwide average SAIDI score for 2023 was 376.90, while AMU had a SAIDI score of 28.3. Data from the Energy Department also shows AMU customers experience power interruptions much less frequently than the average electric customer nationwide.
