Crews replaced, upgraded equipment in downtown Gulfport

Coast Division crews have been busy performing preventive maintenance from the 29th Avenue substation west to Island View Casino and Memorial Hospital.

“We installed animal protection on all of the equipment on the lines so we’ll have a much more reliable feeder,” Engineering Team Leader Joe Cole said. “This was a proactive measure to increase reliability for our customers served by this feeder.”

Crews also inspected, and made necessary repairs, to all of the splices throughout the feeder and replaced copper wire in a number of areas with aluminum.

“It’s been a major coordinated effort between numerous parties to ensure we are able to quickly cover this area with multiple projects in a short amount of time,” Cole said. “Thanks to the hard work of our line crews and engineering support, we’re on track with minimal customer outage inconvenience.”

As a company who takes pride in service reliability, proactively upgrading the distribution system is one of the many reasons Mississippi Power has continually posted excellent System Average Interruption Duration Index and System Average Interruption Frequency Index scores. SAIDI and SAIFI are reliability indicators used by electric power utilities.

In 2013, the company set a distribution SAIDI goal to be less than 89.0. SAIDI is a standard industry metric that represents the number of outage minutes customers experience on average. At the end of December, the average Mississippi Power customer was without power for less than an hour, 55.3 minutes, which is an all-time best.

Regarding SAIFI, the company’s distribution goal was 1.23 or just over one interruption on average per customer per year. The company again exceeded expectations with a score of .81 interruptions that was the third best year ever for SAIFI.

The work in downtown Gulfport concluded this week.