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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.
Having our power turned off for what might happen was a shock. The results of Boulder's lawsuit and Xcels response was unexpected but probably should not have been. Receiving an email that electricity may be shut off versus will be shut off is a little different. The aspect of may shutting off power if there is high wind damage etc. is different than just wind is high we are shutting it off. Having to suffer through a high wind event without power was totally not expected. No cooking, no refrigerator, no hot water, garage door shut, etc. We have embraced... Continue reading
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My neighbor's dead tree knocked our power line off our house. It was never de-energized by Xcel and we were told power will not be turned off and nobody will be out to fix it until all power is restored elsewhere. This seems counter-intuitive to the original intent of deactivating lines to prevent fires. I do not feel safe at home and haven't been sleeping well with an active power line down in my yard intertwined with a dead tree.
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I'm a senior citizen that relies on an air machine and this outage was very hard on me. I ended up using all the battery on my portable compressor and I went through three tall cylinders of air. This incredibly long outage caused me health concerns.
I was also upset that Xcel Energy didn't recognize my town. Myself, and several others in my town, reported an outage, but when I went to the website to check on when it would be over, it said no outages were reported! REALLY?
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I have a mobility disability and rely on a motorized chair and a stair lift in my home. I was only given 6 hours notice about planned outage; not enough time to make arrangements to be moved to a non-affected location. Power went out at 4 pm Sat. Came on again at 2pm Sunday. Battery backup on my stair lift went dead second day so I was stuck on a house level with no bathroom or water until power returned. Issues:
1. Short notice of planned outage and vague description of where in Loveland 2. Outage map needs to be... Continue reading
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Xcel cut the power to my subdivision pre-emptively despite the fact that we have no overhead lines. The neighborhoods surrounding ours had power with lights visible throughout the outage.When I checked Xcel’s outage website for an estimate of when power might be restored at my address it said “no outage detected.” All my neighbors got that same result. After my power came back on I got a text saying my power might remain off.
It seemed like they didn’t know who did or didn’t have power. (With no estimate of the duration of the outage I drove to Longmont and... Continue reading
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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... Continue reading
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I didn't have enough lighting devices (Kindle screens only go so far), and it got very cold in the house. I could have used some information about food spoiling, appropriate lighting, phone chargers. My elderly neighbor couldn't process the very very long phone message, and had to ask for help. She also had no lighting and stumbled around in the dark and cold. She was scared. Her power was only restored on Monday! But something else truly frightened me: I read in the paper that Foothills Hospital hadn't gotten any communication from Xcel about power restoration. They have been running... Continue reading
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We saw the precautionary measure and that Xcel would be holding a press conference. A link was provided by all the news channels on Saturday, nothing happened when we tried the link for live stream of the press conference. Our Excel account was up to date, did not receive any notifications. Filed our outage Sunday morning at 2:00am. Continued to watch the outage map which included terrible information for those affected. While we are close to the Marshall Fire location we apparently were not part of the 55,000. Called the 800 customer service number multiple times with no updates available... Continue reading
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We were aware that the Front Range "may" have preemptive outages- per the news and XCel, however, we NEVER received any specific information that our house was actually going to be part of that shut down. XCel keeps publicly saying that the information they have on file must be correct in order to have been notified, well, our information on file with XCel IS and WAS correct, yet no notifications were received. We rely on medical devices and having no notice put our health at risk. Our little subdivision (approx. 1350 houses) was the ONLY one in our entire town... Continue reading
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Electric Service out for approximately 44 hours not sure if food in refrigerator is editable. Received multiple messages via voicemail to home phone, which was not working without electricity. Received the messages because Xfinity translated them into writing which was on my Xfinity email account that I could access from my cell phone. I was able to review them via text messages. Received multiple messages that my service was out, which was quite obvious, and one stating it would be restored at 4:47 pm on Sunday. Never happened. Called 800 895 4999 and finally contacted a person which was very... Continue reading
