Electric Utilities Editing and Proofreading Services

Ninety thousand people are without power and every one of them wants the same thing: not sympathy, not an apology, but a time. The utility does not know the time. What it says next, in a message written under pressure and read by people whose freezers are defrosting, determines whether the outage is remembered as bad weather or as bad service — and those two outcomes look identical from the control room.

We edit what electric utilities produce — outage communications and restoration estimates, storm and major event messaging, planned interruption notices, customer service standards and compensation terms, connection and supply agreements, tariff and price change notifications, network investment and price control submissions, safety messaging about downed lines and equipment, vulnerable and priority customer materials, distributed generation and connection guidance, performance reporting to regulators and customers, and community and landowner correspondence about works. Our editors work on what customers are told while the lights are out.

Outage messaging is where a utility's reputation is made in a few hours, and the central problem is the estimated restoration time. Utilities either withhold it, which reads as evasion, or issue one they cannot meet, which is worse. We work through these so an estimate is given with the confidence attached to it, since "we expect power back by 6 p.m. for most of the affected area; if you are in the Aberlour or Craigellachie sections it is more likely to be tomorrow morning" is honest and usable, and a single number for everybody is neither; so the estimate is revised on a stated schedule and the revision is issued even when nothing has changed, because silence is what turns a wait into an abandonment; so what is actually happening is described in terms that convey scale — the number of separate faults, not the number of crews — as customers judge effort by the size of the problem rather than by reassurance; so the message says what the customer should do, particularly about medical equipment, food, and generators, before it says what the utility is doing; so the compensation entitlement is stated in the outage message rather than left to be discovered; and so the language never suggests certainty the utility does not have. Utilities that write this way get through storms with their reputation.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including network information, communications and regulatory submissions. We are editors rather than utility, engineering or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on restoration, network operations or compensation obligations. What we can do is make an honest estimate more useful than a confident one.