The head of Pepco Holdings Inc. told the Montgomery County Council he doesn’t expect Pepco to be top-performing in the next several years.
“I’m not even shooting for average,” CEO Joe Rigby told council members over lunch Monday, explaining that he doesn’t think Pepco can realistically become a “top-performing” electric utility in the next two to three years.
“I don’t understand how you as a company, you as the CEO, can settle for anything less than top-performing reliability,” said Councilman Roger Berliner, D-Bethesda.
But Rigby explained that he has lower expectations than Berliner does.
When Councilman Phil Andrews, D-Gaithersburg/Rockville, asked what tangible results the public should expect from Pepco’s efforts to improve reliability after storms, Rigby said he is aiming for no outages longer than two days.
“I don’t want to say that [two-day outages are] ever acceptable, but … people can process that,” he said.
A county-commissioned study published in February found that 10,430 of the 10,895 residents surveyed — more than 95 percent — had experienced at least one power outage longer than five hours over the previous year. Those outages cost residents an estimated $22.9 million to $114.6 million, the study reported.
