Xcel never seems to know when we have power or not

We lost power as part of the PSPS at 10am on Wed Dec 17th, even though the lines in our neighborhood are underground. Power was not restored until Thu Dec 18th at 12:30pm. Then on Friday we lost power for the next PSPS at 6am, power was restored at 2pm Sat.

Each time, I had to periodically use Xcel's outage checker and report that out outage was still ongoing even though Xcel listed our address as having power. We had the same issue with the PSPS last April.

The estimates Xcel provided as to when power would be restored were wildly inaccurate and appeared to be the same throughout most of Boulder. In addition, Xcel promised to notify us if the power would not be restored within one hour of their estimated restoration time. Those updated never ocurred. The only time we got an update when when I submitted a notification via the Xcel web site that our power was still off when Xcel's maps and online checker said it should be on. Due to this outage my wife and I lost three days of work and most of the contents of our refrigerator and freezer.

Part of Xcel's franchise agreement with Boulder was that Xcel would underground its transmission lines. It is clear that not enough progress has been made on that front. Undergrounding transmission lines is a complex and time consuming process but it needs to be prioritized by Xcel to avoid these preventable shut-offs. Neighborhoods where the lines are already underground are still vulnerable to being shut-off in an emergency when the lines feeding those areas are still above ground.