ComEd 2011 Annual Report Download - page 21

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19
UTILITIES
Exelon operates two large urban utilities, ComEd in
Chicago and Philadelphia-based PECO. Each utility
company is locally managed, with a continued focus on
safety and reliability, for the benefit of the companies’
customers, employees and communities.
COMED
ComEd, headquartered in Chicago, serves approximately 70 percent of Illinois’ population
– about 9 million people – in a service territory that spans 11,400 square miles. ComEd’s
outage frequency was the lowest in its history at 0.84 outages per customer, while outage
duration was the fourth-best performance on record at an average of 88 minutes. ComEd
customer demand reached an all-time high-peak usage milestone during a heat wave in
late July, with demand reaching 23,753 megawatts. This exceeded the utility’s previous peak
of 23,618 megawatts in August 2006.
ComEd took important steps prior to this heat wave to enhance system reliability, including
the construction – on time and under budget – of the Fisk-Crawford 345-kilovolt overhead
line and Fisk autotransformers that went into service on July 10, 2011. Additional work was
performed even while crews continued to repair damage from one of the largest and
most destructive storms in a decade: the storm that struck the ComEd service territory on
July 11 knocked out power to more than 900,000 customers. The entire active storm season
affected approximately 2.5 million ComEd customers, and we are grateful to our employees
for their hard work to safely restore power.
In October, the Illinois General Assembly enacted the Energy Infrastructure Modernization
Act, landmark legislation that will modernize the ComEd electric grid and deliver tangible
benefits to consumers. The bill authorizes implementation of a 10-year, $2.6 billion
Top: At the PECO Transmission
System Operations Center in
Philadelphia, operators keep close
watch on the regional electric grid.
Bottom Left: ComEd’s state-of-the-
art substation in Chicago’s West
Loop. This was part of an eight-
year, $350 million project that
also created multiple sources of
supply for other downtown Chicago
substations and substantially
improved reliability for downtown
businesses and neighborhoods.
Bottom Right: Both BGE and PECO
deliver natural gas, source of this
flame, to customers in their
service territories.