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Update 7/24/2024
As a result of the follow up actions to the initial power shutoff in April, the PUC requested that Xcel submit to the Commission a description of what immediate improvements they will make to customer communication, preparedness and coordination with emergency responders. The PUC has received this information from Xcel which can be found here. We are seeking public input by August 13, 2024. We welcome your feedback.
Summary
Over the weekend of April 6-7, Colorado experienced a weather event that brought wind gusts in excess of 100 mph in some areas of the state and sustained high winds throughout the weekend. The outages and weather impacts were concentrated in the northern front range. Over 150,000 people across 9 counties were without power statewide during the event. 55,000 of these were the result of an intentional, precautionary outage conducted by Xcel to reduce the possibility of wildfire. The remaining outages were either due to damage to lines or use of another preventative measures..
While power outages are a frequent impact of Colorado weather events, the April storm was the first time that Xcel pro-actively deployed preventative safety outages. In addition, a significant portion of the distribution system that would normally be set to attempt to automatically re-energize was not re-powered until visual inspection by utility crews. This precautionary measure meant a longer down period than usual as field crews had to manually inspect lines that had been de-energized. These measures are used in other western states including California and Oregon.
Please share your input and personal experience so the PUC can determine whether new regulatory approaches are necessary for precautionary outages.
Update 7/24/2024
As a result of the follow up actions to the initial power shutoff in April, the PUC requested that Xcel submit to the Commission a description of what immediate improvements they will make to customer communication, preparedness and coordination with emergency responders. The PUC has received this information from Xcel which can be found here. We are seeking public input by August 13, 2024. We welcome your feedback.
Summary
Over the weekend of April 6-7, Colorado experienced a weather event that brought wind gusts in excess of 100 mph in some areas of the state and sustained high winds throughout the weekend. The outages and weather impacts were concentrated in the northern front range. Over 150,000 people across 9 counties were without power statewide during the event. 55,000 of these were the result of an intentional, precautionary outage conducted by Xcel to reduce the possibility of wildfire. The remaining outages were either due to damage to lines or use of another preventative measures..
While power outages are a frequent impact of Colorado weather events, the April storm was the first time that Xcel pro-actively deployed preventative safety outages. In addition, a significant portion of the distribution system that would normally be set to attempt to automatically re-energize was not re-powered until visual inspection by utility crews. This precautionary measure meant a longer down period than usual as field crews had to manually inspect lines that had been de-energized. These measures are used in other western states including California and Oregon.
Please share your input and personal experience so the PUC can determine whether new regulatory approaches are necessary for precautionary outages.
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We live in the wind corridor between Nederland and Marshall, where hurricane-force winds in late December 2021 were ignored by Xcel, contributing to the disastrous fire. So we favor pro-active cutting power to lines in a very serious wind event like April 6-7. But such shut-downs have very serious consequences and Xcel's messaging was poorly done.
We received several phone and email notices Friday evening and Saturday morning that there might be a shutdown beginning about 3 pm Saturday. We had not finished preparing for the possible shutdown when we lost electricity at 2:15 pm, 45 minutes early. We never... Continue reading
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I received both an email and phone call warning me that I would lost power at 3pm, but several of my direct neighbors did not receive notification. In the end, I never lost power (so not complaining about that). But it seems like the list of who receives notification didn't line up with the planned outage zones, so there is room for improvement in that area.
Overall, I'm glad Xcel was proactive in mitigating wildfire risk, but it sounds like there are a LOT of kinks to work out to ensure that the correct people receive timely notification and that... Continue reading
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I am a member of a community HOA in Wheat Ridge. The entire condo property, 64 residences, was without power for 40 hours. On Saturday, April 6, at about 10:30 pm, high winds felled a pine tree in a backyard on the residential block adjacent to ours, apparently causing the outage that impacted our community. I later learned that the fallen tree caused a live power wire to disconnect from a home and give off sparks as it contacted the ground in the backyard. The fire department was called and advised the residents of that home to spend the night... Continue reading
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A number of people have mentioned this and I agree. This proactive power shut down was more about legal liability mitigation for XCEL Energy than fire mitigation. I would imagine there are any number of best practices for wildfire risk mitigation sparked by power lines than a power shut down that would not be 100% risk free but quite effective and much less impact to the people who live in our community. This should be investigated.
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We were out of town and heard about it from the woman taking care of our pets. We got one voicemail the day before saying Xcel MAY turn off the power and nothing after that.
I work as a Wildfire Mitigation Specialist. I sincerely hope they are getting advising from a wildfire specialist. On the plains where grasses dry out fast, I could see the merit of preemptively turning off power. However, up in the foothills, there is still snow on the ground and the soils are saturated, thus meaning risk was minimal. They shut off power up there, where... Continue reading
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My family has my wife, a 4 year old daughter, 10 year old autistic son, 12 year old son and we live at Wadsworth and C-470.
My Facts & Timeline
We received a phone call at approximately 4/6 at about 11:30 am from XCel indicating that our power was going to be shutdown to an incoming windstorm. In the 25 years I've lived in Southwest Littleton and 45 years in Denver, I had never heard of a "Preventative Shutdown" on power. In addition, while my house is approximately 15 years old, the subdivision area is Columbine which has been around... Continue reading
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I would like to summarize what we experienced, my concerns, associated impacts and suggested improvements. We lost power about 3:30pm Saturday April 6 without receiving notice it would be shut down. Power was not restored until Monday morning at 9:30am. I had just grocery shopped so two refrigerators were full of food...all of which had to be replaced. I recently had surgery so after it "appeared" it would go into a second night I booked hotel room for our family....3 rooms.
Aside from a significant financial impact and the stress of being without power especially when the outage lasted as... Continue reading
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I have no problem with the preventative shutdown, my issue was the communication of when it would be back up..Saturday their website said Noon on Sunday...on Sunday we got an automated call that it would be sometime Sunday to sometime Tuesday. My power came back on 1pm on Monday..They have energy grids, they need more specific voicemails that are targeted by neighborhood.
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We were informed by a VM on Sat that our power would be shut off approx at 3 PM and it was. I didn’t listen to the first VM on Fri as assumed it was a junk call. Text would have been better. Then it was impossible to get updates as to when our power might return. For the first 24 hrs, I kept inputting our address on Excels website, but it would say no update available. Then some time on Sun when I checked, then it said that there was NO OUTAGE reported at our address! Why would we... Continue reading
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I live in Louisville, which was hit hard by the Marshall Fire several years ago, and fortunately, my home survived the fire. However, what doesn’t make sense is that 70% of Louisville still had power over the weekend, but my neighborhood wasn’t so lucky and we had no power for 40 hours. Furthermore, the weather conditions over the weekend was nothing like the days leading up the Marshall Fire! However, some overpaid executives at Xcel were covering their butts with ‘let’s show them‘ attitude without fully understanding the consequences of their decision. I bet none of those decision-makers lost power... Continue reading
