Safety & Reliability
For the second year in a row, extreme winds interrupted power to hundreds of thousands of SMUD customers, with gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour for 12 straight hours in early February. The work we did following the historic January 2023 storms to enhance our storm response significantly improved our speed of restoration and the accuracy of estimated restoration times. We provided customers with new outage status information, letting them know when crews were scheduled to arrive and restore their power. We also utilized new technologies and processes to rapidly build and accurately deliver on our restoration schedule. The storm allowed us to test the improvements, which resulted in significant enhancements to our customers' experiences.
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As we move closer to having zero workplace incidents across SMUD, our Safety for Life focus remains on developing and implementing safeguards that minimize the severity of incidents for our employees – at home and at work. In 2024, SMUD saw a 61% decrease in the amount of time injured employees spent away from their normal job duties due in large part to the Health and Safety team’s delivery of ergonomic evaluations, field visits and assessments of workers and tasks.
In 2024, we completed extensive vegetation management, wildfire mitigation and pole and cable replacements to support reliability. This included trimming 98,000 trees and replacing 850 poles and 240,000 feet of underground cable.
There was significant progress in the design and construction of 5 transmission substation projects, including starting design on Station J, a new substation that will add capacity for the Railyards and downtown Kaiser Hospital, as well as completing 30 substation upgrades across the region to ensure reliability and capacity.
We also made major investments in our power generation facilities this year, including many reliability projects within the Upper American River Project (UARP) and at our thermal plants.