NOVEC Case Study
Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative Drives Operational Excellence and Targeted Investment through Data-Driven Benchmarking
Company
Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC) is an electric distribution system headquartered in Manassas, Virginia that is owned by its’ customers. NOVEC provides reliable electric service to more than 180,000 homes and businesses in Clarke, Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford counties, the City of Manassas Park, and the Town of Clifton.
Situation
NOVEC is a high-performing utility that evaluates system performance primarily through high-level macro indicators, such as System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) scores. While these aggregate scores consistently position NOVEC as a top performer compared to both regional electric cooperatives and investor-owned utilities, they masked localized pockets of poor reliability. NOVEC’s goal has been to gain greater visibility into the experience of customers in specific service areas and identify targeted opportunities to further strengthen reliability and customer satisfaction.
Addressing these localized pockets of poor performance has required strong alignment across operations, customer care, engineering, and finance. NOVEC sought a shared, data-driven framework that would help cross-functional teams evaluate targeted investments consistently, demonstrate their value, and prioritize reliability improvements for specific areas.
Solution
In 2022, NOVEC joined the panel of First Quartile’s Electric Transmission & Distribution Benchmarking Program, which includes approximately 30 large utilities throughout North America. This panel focuses on multiple T&D challenges, including reliability and resilience, costs and resource allocation, assets and work practices, safety and risk mitigation. The program evaluates system reliability metrics, such as SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI, momentaries, vegetation management, OSHA safety, grid resilience, asset management, capital investment, and outage restoration performance.
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Through discussions with other utilities, it is apparent that long-standing approach of “cost per minutes of SAIDI” used by many utilities as a decision metric is no longer appropriate. Additional factors include:
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Improving workforce safety by avoiding sending crews to the same areas time after time and during stressful emergency conditions
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Increasing Customer satisfaction and protecting company reputation by recognizing that customers with bad reliability experiences are upset and can be quite vocal
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Reducing employee stress, especially in the Operations and Customer Engagement groups, by addressing areas on the system that cause repeated issues and unexpected emergencies.
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This has helped NOVEC transition from excellence in overall reliability to increasingly ensure that all customers receive solid reliability.
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NOVEC has established an event-by-event micro-monitoring system specifically designed to track localized pockets of poor performance. This includes deploying operational response crews to conduct targeted inspections immediately after disruption events occurred, and then develop follow-up actions based on observations and identified reliability patterns. By embedding objective performance metrics directly into operational planning, NOVEC established a standardized methodology to justify targeted capital investments across its three core operational pillars: electric system reliability, outage management, and workforce safety.
Results
NOVEC is a top performing utility in SAIDI, SAIFI and CAIDI which is “rarefied air” in the utility industry.
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The First Quartile’s Electric Transmission & Distribution Benchmarking Program has helped NOVEC compare metrics and best practices with other utilities. From there, NOVEC drove meaningful changes in operational priorities and day-to-day behaviors, particularly around reliability, embedding proactive monitoring into daily operations. Operating teams now continuously track localized problem pockets and dispatch specialized crews promptly upon detecting issues.
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By systematically resolving localized service gaps, NOVEC reduced operational, public, and regulatory risk while improving customer satisfaction in many areas.
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The data-backed decision-making model has provided objective support for targeted resource allocation decisions, protecting vital reliability funding during budget reviews and helping to ensure long-term operational resilience.
"Anything that I do as an executive, if I'm going to spend money and use our precious resources, I want it based on numbers and science, not on something I think would be good. First Quartile’s T&D Benchmarking is paramount in providing data-driven decisions on allocations of precious funding."
— Tom Pierpoint, Vice President of Operations, NOVEC.
