Santee Cooper: We’re Here When You Need Us
Facts ARE Facts
Santee Cooper is the most reliable source of electricity among large power companies in South Carolina, by a factor of five or more depending on the utility. That’s a fact.
Think about it: What misery would an August day without your AC bring? Or an afternoon without power for a retailer dependent on each day’s sales? No utility can guarantee power delivery 100 percent of the time, but Santee Cooper comes very close: 99.9961 percent (and our transmission reliability is even a little better, at 99.9973 percent).
Translated, that means Santee Cooper retail customers were without power last year less than 21 minutes on average. The closest comparable South Carolina utility posted an average customer outage time of nearly 100 minutes. And our transmission delivery points were without power for just 14 minutes. (This data excludes impacts of hurricanes. Because much of the country does not see hurricanes, the industry reports reliability excluding major events.) Reliability is a cornerstone of Santee Cooper’s history, and you can bet it’s a part of our future. Outages happen, but we take great pride in restoring power to our customers quickly and safely.
It’s something our customers value, too, as results from our 2018 customer surveys show. Consider the satisfaction rates for these survey topics:
- Keep power outages to a minimum – 99.2 percent of commercial customers and 98.3 percent of residential customers were satisfied (industrial customers weren’t asked this question)
- Restoring power as quickly as possible after an interruption – 96.6 percent of residential, 99 percent of commercial and 97 percent of industrial customers were satisfied
- Quality of power provided – 98 percent of residential, 99.5 percent of commercial and 98 percent industrial customers were satisfied
- Responding quickly to customer questions and problems – 96.5 percent of residential, 97.6 percent of commercial and 100 percent of industrial customers were satisfied
Don’t take our word for it, though. This is how one industrial customer said it:
“Here it’s all about ‘do we have power,’ and that is a very low worry for me. … We have very few problems with the reliability of power. They have eliminated outages, and that’s a good thing.”
Santee Cooper delivers reliability. And that’s a fact.
