Don't Assume Best Ideas For Reliability Are Inside Maryland

From BGE's required report to the PSC on the recent derecho:  'It is important to note that no utility east of the Mississippi River could have anticipated the raw strength of this storm system.'   So what does BGE know about how utilities west of the Mississippi River would have done differently?  What could be learned and applied to BGE's infrastructure if BGE would benchmark and make improvements based on what's learned from the top performing utilities in the nation?  It was mentioned again at the recent reliability hearing in Howard County that BGE performs in the bottom quartile nationally.  The City Paper recently published an editorial (7.11.2012) in which BGE was compared unfavorably with reliability in the rural Middle East: "BGE's four year average SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration Index) score was significantly worse than that scores obtained by utilities serving even rural areas in the Middle East."  BGE scored a 4.09 to the rural Middle East's 3.6 score.  It's past time to learn from what other companies and countries are doing right.  I've heard many stories about how utilities responsible for repeated hurricane landfall locations have better reliability than BGE where hurricanes have been reduced to tropical storm strength before entering BGE's service area.  What do Myrtle Beach, SC and Miami, FL, etc, and whichever utilities face the worst weather west of the Mississippi River do to keep the lights on?  There was great testimony at the recent Howard County hearing from someone who had lived in a number of far flung locales around the world to include Taiwan; Oahu, Hawaii; and Australia, and had encountered better reliability than with BGE.  I'm concerned Governor O’Malley is late in understanding the seriousness of the reliability problem by waiting until just recently to issue an executive order "to mobilize several key government agencies to solicit input and recommendations from experts throughout the State to improve and strengthen Maryland’s utility infrastructure and create a more resilient electric distribution system".  Is this going to be Pepco advising BGE, and BGE advising Pepco?  For all our sakes, I hope these are not the in-state experts the executive order is talking about.  But I was shocked last year to hear from my own networking with Montgomery County government that Pepco was being encouraged to benchmark with BGE for best practices.  Let's look beyond Maryland for best ideas on reliability because there are no stellar performers here, and let's have sufficient transparency into the process so that we-the-people can understand which options are chosen and why, and how our money is used and by when -- even if it's a decade or two to completion -- we can expect the first rate service we pay for.