Bridging reliability visibility gaps through data readiness in municipal utilities

Electricity reliability information supports operational response, regulatory oversight, emergency coordination, infrastructure planning, and public accountability. Municipal utilities represent an important segment of the electricity sector, yet their reliability performance is often less visible in reporting and outage-visibility pathways. Georgia provides a useful case for examining how utility-level differences in outage-data systems and operational capacity shape reliability visibility across utility types. The analysis combines a statewide scan with survey evidence from municipal utilities to assess representation in federal reliability reporting and public outage aggregation systems that compile utility-reported information and website-based outage updates. Results show persistent visibility gaps, with only a small subset of municipal utilities reporting standardized reliability metrics to federal systems and few appearing consistently in outage aggregation platforms used for benchmarking and situational awareness. Survey responses from municipal utilities affiliated with Electric Cities of Georgia identify the operational conditions underlying these gaps. Utilities often rely on customer reports and field crew verification for outage detection, and many do not consistently translate these operational data into reporting-ready outputs because of workforce and technical capacity limitations, legacy system integration challenges, and uncertainty about long-term system usability. The findings show that reliability visibility depends not only on monitoring technologies, but also on the operational capacity required to produce decision-ready outage information. Strengthening reliability oversight therefore requires investment in data readiness, workforce capacity, workflow integration, and implementation support alongside technology deployment.