NEW ULM — New Ulm was recognized for its exceptional electricity during the Public Utilities Commission meeting Tuesday.

New Ulm Public Utilities received a Certificate of Excellence in Reliability for 2023 from the American Public Power Association, an award they have received for the past six years.

Utility Engineer Dan Pirsig said the award is given for electric system reliability, ensuring power is there when it’s needed for the people. To do so, they track their outage data and use three metrics.

One is how often the system is interrupted per customer, two is how long interruptions are per customer, and three is how long the average interruption is.

“It’s one way we can benchmark our system to compare ourselves to others and ask ‘How are we really doing?'” Pirsig said.

While they had won the award for several years, Pirsig said he’s not sure how New Ulm could have had a better year. In terms of outages per customer, Pirsig said they registered a 0.02, meaning on average there were only two outages per 100 customers. Across the entire region, the average was 0.58, for 58 outages per 100 customers.

New Ulm also shined when it came to average outage time per customer. Spread across all customers, the average person only had around one minute of outage time the entire year. This is well below the regional average, where the average customer had around 47 minutes of outage time for the year.

The margin was closer on average interruption time. The average time service was interrupted in 2023 was 62.25 minutes, less time than the regional average of 75.97 minutes. Of the major interruptions in 2023, only two affected more than one person, and only one of those affected more than 100 people.

What were the keys to success? Pirsig said they have high maintenance standards, including replacing cables, trimming trees, testing pole strength and preservation, and five-year testing of breakers, switches, and relays.

“People have worked very hard for a long time on this achievement,” Pirsig said.

Pirsig said they also got a tad lucky, as a lack of really bad weather events in the summer ensured service was smooth and outages were kept to a minimum.

“One really bad weather event can really damage our numbers,” he said. “Previous years when we had really bad numbers, usually you look back and there was a storm.”