Very Poor All Around

Communication and execution of the planned outages were extremely poor in all regards. It’s incomprehensible to think that 1-4 hours is acceptable to notify people of a planned extended power outage. This gives people no time to prepare. Even so the messaging was extremely unclear using verbiage like “may” and not providing any clear maps to know if my house was going to be taken down or not. Further the notifications indicated power would be back online by around noon on Sunday. That was extremely false as our power was not restored until noon on Monday, and all ongoing communication on Sunday was very unclear and vague. No One knew anything at Xcel. More clear and honest messaging about the risk and likelihood of power outages of this length would have at least enabled people to take different mitigation approaches. Finally, to make this decision when the infrastructure of Xcel wasn’t even prepared or did not even have the technology to quickly restore power once weather conditions were improved is incredibly poor. States like California have executed plans like this for years, with 24-48 hour notifications, clear timelines, and technology to turn power on extremely quickly afterwards (no ridiculous manual line checks like Xcel). Xcel was clearly unprepared in every single aspect of this plan.

All in all the extremely poor communication and execution impacted my family financially by over $1K, as we lost an entire refrigerator full of food due to no power for 46 hours and nearly every store nearby being sold out of ice. I then was forced to make a decision to purchase a generator to save the remaining thousands of dollars of freezer foods and to be able perform some of my remote work obligations required to maintain my employment. All these financial impacts will not be recouped and most all could have been avoided with basic common sense customer service. If Xcel was not a monopoly and I had a choice for any other energy provider I would choose to use any other provider 100 out of 100 times. I’m also concerned over the precedent this has set and if I should expect these planned outages for any potential weather events in the future which may cause me to consider moving.

I work in customer service and it’s clear the customer was last on Xcel’s mind with all decisions made in this event. Covering themselves from litigation was their only concern. I hope someone holds this monopoly accountable to ensure any future decisions do not impact people’s lives, safety and finances in the extreme manner that this situation did.

Regards,
Littleton Customer