Safety and Reliability

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 frequency and severity of incidents for our employees and contractors, at home and at work. An important part of this in 2025 was employee/supervisor safety interactions, which are preventive communications to help identify and remove barriers to safe work. We exceeded our year-end goal with more than 10,000 of these interactions completed — 80% more than in 2024. These efforts helped deliver a reduction in Days Away, Restricted Time (DART) incidents to 12 incidents this year, which is below the 5-year limit set by the SMUD Board in 2021.

In 2025, we replaced 210,237 circuit-feet of cable and 700+ poles, patrolled 2,800 miles of overhead transmission and distribution lines, inspected 1,100+ transmission line towers and trimmed 95,000 trees, all while maintaining a 95% customer satisfaction rating for vegetation management work.

Affirming our commitment to reliability standards in 2025, we completed the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) audit with zero findings. 

Innovation and piloting new technology is an essential part of enhancing grid reliability. This year, we deployed ANYmal, a ground-based robot dog, to assist substation maintenance workers by performing daily tasks such as gas monitoring, infrared inspections and partial discharge testing to detect early signs of potential equipment failure at substations. We also installed 500 solar-powered Gridware monitoring devices to enable early outage detection on our transmission and distribution lines. The Gridscope Sensors allow for proactive maintenance and real-time alerts on weather factors, including temperature, winds speed and humidity.