Every utility person I have known for nearly three decades is concerned with the critical mission of safely keeping the lights on in the most cost-effective manner possible. It may not feel that way to the public sometimes, as we must deal with everything from weather and equipment shortages to critters getting into lines and vehicle accidents causing the power to go out.
The wild windstorms in mid-December were extreme, and the intensity of the winds unprecedented. However, we prepare for these severe weather events, and in so doing, ensuring the safety of our employees, our members, and our communities is our priority. The lengthy outages that affected many United Power members during this windstorm were the result of the cooperative operating in protective mode for wildfire safety during the back-to-back windstorm events that impacted our mountain territory. In this operating mode, lines are placed in the most sensitive settings, and power is immediately shut off if anything is detected on the system. Before power can be safely restored, crews must complete physical inspections of all power lines and equipment. These inspections are critical for public safety and can take time — particularly when outages are widespread and restoration can be delayed when damage is found.
We know the loss of power means an interruption in our day-to-day routines and our ability to work or go to school. However, it is important also to understand that when a transmission provider opts to shut off power (public safety power shutoff) or when the transmission provider loses power due to a weather event (e.g., damage to lines), United Power’s members may also lose power. The cooperative operates a distribution system, which includes the wires to homes and businesses in our service territory, but United Power does not control the interstate and intrastate transmission lines carrying electricity from faraway places. This is one of the reasons we are focused on hyper-localizing our resources whenever we can to stay off the “big wires.” It is another reason why we have added so many distributed batteries to the system and plan to add more.
We cannot restore service to the local distribution system until transmission has been re-energized. It is important to realize that after outages occur due to storms, we must visually inspect every line on the distribution system. Our brave crews worked for several days to make sure trees were out of the wires. Sometimes our crews would inspect and restore power only to have new branches blown into lines after they had moved on. We must maintain a careful balance between restoring power to homes and businesses and mitigating the threat of wildfires.
We continue investing heavily into our distribution system, deploying the most practical and innovative technology we can. This involves installing coated cables in the mountain territory, and special fusing and sensors systemwide to be able to understand what is happening on our grid in real time. We can only see what is taking place on the distribution side of the United Power system. We do not have visibility to what is occurring on the transmission side — we only know whether power is flowing or not.
The United Power system is one of the most reliable in the nation, and that is one of the reasons outages seem so out of the ordinary. When we do have “normal” outages, they are usually quite short, which makes extended outages seem even more unusual and frustrating to members.
I am so proud of the team at United Power for the work they did during the December wind event and continue to do every day to benefit our members. Our management team has spent time looking at what worked well, what did not work so well, and what we can do to improve when another event occurs.
Every morning when I get up, the first thing I check is whether we kept the lights on for our members and if everyone is safe. Power outages will occur — that is the reality of the system dealing with nature. But we will always be here for our members, ready to get the lights back on.
As always, feel free to reach out to me personally with any questions or comments.
