Four of Ohio’s Six Regulated Utilities Missed Reliability Standards in 2025, and Now Want Regulators to Lower the Bar

Four of Ohio’s six regulated electric utilities failed to meet the state’s grid reliability standards in 2025. That is the 10th consecutive year in which at least one Ohio utility has missed the benchmarks regulators set for outage frequency and restoration time, according to a Canary Media review of Public Utilities Commission filings.

The response from two of those companies is not a plan to do better. It is a request to be measured against a lower standard.

The filings. FirstEnergy’s three Ohio utilities, Ohio Edison, Toledo Edison, and the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, along with Duke Energy Ohio, have asked the commission to relax the targets they are graded against. Together those four utilities serve 2.9 million customers. In Ohio’s regulatory language, a customer is a household or a business, not an individual, which means every commercial building in those territories sits inside the outage statistics now under negotiation.

The proposed changes read as small. A compromise worked out between Duke and commission staff would raise the allowable outage frequency from an average of 0.75 interruptions per customer each year to 0.87. The Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel calculated what that fraction means in practice: more than 90,000 outages above what the current standard permits. FirstEnergy wants its Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison subsidiaries allowed an additional 0.05 interruptions per customer, which the Consumers’ Counsel puts at more than 69,000 additional outages. For Cleveland Electric Illuminating customers, FirstEnergy is asking that the permitted extra time to restore power rise by roughly 15 minutes.

Both companies cite extreme weather. FirstEnergy’s filing pointed to “smaller but more disruptive storms, heavier rainfall, and a rise in tree-related outages.” Duke cited weather variability and vehicle accidents. The argument has a structural weakness: major storm events are already excluded from the reliability calculations. The standards measure ordinary-day performance, and ordinary-day performance is what these utilities missed.

The enforcement gap. When a utility falls short, it owes regulators an explanation and an action plan. Repeated failure exposes a company to penalties measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. For utilities reporting record profits, that is not a deterrent. It is a line item. The reliability standard is the only quantitative service-quality obligation a regulated Ohio utility carries, and the penalty attached to breaching it is small enough that the cheaper path is to renegotiate the number rather than meet it.

This is not new behavior. The commission has previously granted similar requests, including for AEP Ohio. What is new is the context. The standards are being loosened at the same moment Ohio commercial electricity bills are climbing and the regional grid is absorbing data-center load growth that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has formally flagged as a blackout risk.

Why the averages mislead. A reliability average smooths over the fact that grid conditions are not uniform within a service territory. Older equipment and deferred maintenance concentrate outages in specific neighborhoods and corridors. Karin Nordstrom, an attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council, made the point directly: the customer experiences behind an average “can fluctuate greatly with even a small adjustment.” A building on an aging feeder does not experience 0.87 interruptions. It experiences whatever its segment of the grid delivers, and a relaxed statewide average gives the utility more room to let that segment degrade.

For a commercial property owner, this is the operative detail. A move in a published average from 0.75 to 0.87 does not describe the risk to any single building. It describes how much variance the utility is now permitted to carry without consequence. The reliability standard functioned as a floor under service quality. Lowering the floor transfers the cost of outages, spoiled inventory, idled operations, lost trading hours for a tenant, from the utility’s penalty exposure to the customer’s balance sheet.

The relevant comparison. On-site battery storage has been justified for commercial buildings primarily on demand-charge economics: shaving the monthly peak that drives 40 to 70 percent of a commercial electricity bill. Reliability has usually been treated as a secondary benefit, the kind of thing a backup generator already covered.

The Ohio filings change that calculation in one specific way. They make the reliability of grid service a variable the building owner cannot assume and cannot control. When a utility is actively lobbying to be held to a weaker standard, the implicit service guarantee behind a commercial lease, behind a tenant’s uptime expectations, behind a cold-storage operator’s insurance posture, becomes something a building owner has to price independently. A battery sized for peak shaving also rides through the short, frequent interruptions that the relaxed standards would specifically permit more of. The two value streams that used to be evaluated separately are converging because the regulatory backstop under one of them is being negotiated away.

What to watch. The commission has finished briefing in both the FirstEnergy and Duke cases and is expected to rule in the coming period. A decision to grant the relaxed standards would do more than adjust two utilities’ report cards. It would confirm that in Ohio, a decade of missed targets is resolved by moving the target, and it would set the reference point the state’s other utilities cite the next time they fall short.

Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis framed the principle the commission now has to rule on: “Reliability standards should protect consumers, not be adjusted downward simply because utilities are repeatedly failing to meet them.” The commission’s answer will tell every commercial customer in AEP Ohio, Duke, and FirstEnergy territory how much weight the grid’s service promise still carries.

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