The Path Forward

I received notice at about 1:30 April 6th that power would go off at 3:00. It was nowhere near enough time to manage such a situation, and it made me angry that this was clearly a circumstance that could be predicted days or even a week prior. Why was I hearing about it at the very last minute? After dropping everything to rush to prepare, thankfully my power stayed on. It made me think about future wind and storm events that would likely come to include these outages as a new normal. While this time I was one of the lucky ones, I knew then that my uninterrupted access to power was becoming a thing of the past. I fully understand Xcel’s decision to mitigate their (and our) exposure to risk, even support it, but have to insist that Xcel take the following steps regarding future preemptive measures:

1. Xcel should publish and distribute a set of criteria they will use to determine when such outages will be implemented, including a map of areas most likely to be affected.
2. They should develop effective and varied communication channels that begin with notices of possible outages as soon as these events are in the forecast, with daily updates in the following days leading up to the event. This would give people up to 10 days to prepare for a possible outage, and several days to know of a likely outage.
3. Excel should offer customers rebates on generators (retroactive to April 6th) to make them more affordable to a broader range of customers and a check list of preparations to consider in the event of an outage.
4. Excel should have extra standby employees to deploy post outage to speed up the timeline for restoring power.

Thank you for taking steps to improve this process moving forward, and for taking public input.