How to make things better

I know a lot of people are upset at the PSPS and I understand. We were reasonably prepared with long term UPSs and a generator that provided essential services. The following is more about how to better handle the situation in the future.

1. Xcel needs some monitoring stations. Relying on weather service predictions isn't appropriate for something this serious. The first shutoff came several hours sooner than it needed to, and the second one did not remove power Thursday night when the winds were strongest. Also a number of people reported loss of power in areas that didn't experience winds high enough to justify it.

2. Obviously like the other utilities that have caused fires and resorted to PSPS, Xcel should be investing in hardening their infrastructure. Most of the fires started by the various utilities in the last few years weren't because a tree fell on a power line. They were because infrastructure that hadn't been adequately maintained and failed. PSPS shouldn't be a way of limiting legal liability because of failure to maintain the infrastructure.

3. The biggest downside of PSPS is once the lines are not energized, there is no way to know if they have been compromised. In many situations, setting the ground fault sensitivity high and no retry would be a better and less disruptive way to mitigate hazards. I believe that is what Core did.

4. When it is necessary to deactivate lines, the utility should have a way to put a lower voltage, limited current signal on the lines. It could be common to all three phases, so no power is delivered, but it would register a ground fault if a line went down. This would take a bit of innovation and experimentation and would require installing some new equipment. Each segment (from a source transformer to a load transformer) would need to be monitored. But doing this would allow them to know the integrity of the lines. When it came time to restore power, they might want to do a continuity check of each phase against the other two (with the load transformer out of the circuit) as a second check of line integrity. While this would require some expenditure, putting all boots on the ground emergency crews wasn't cheap, either. More importantly, it would get power on within minutes when it was safe, rather than days.