||| FROM KRISTA BOUCHEY for ORCAS POWER & LIGHT COOPERATIVE |||
Just before 5 pm on Thursday, December 22, as temperatures dipped into the low 20s, a mainland electrical feeder serving San Juan County lost power. Shortly after the power went out, the Bonneville Power (BPA) team helped identify the cause of the outage which was faulty equipment on Puget Sound Energy’s (PSE) transmission system. OPALCO crews were called out and remained on standby for when the the mainland repairs were complete.
The OPALCO team waited 8 hours for PSE crews to respond and complete the work on the mainland feed. Throughout the evening and into the wee hours of the morning OPALCO was in constant communication with BPA and PSE to coordinate the outage work.
The Lopez crew making repairs on Friday, December 23.
At 2:10 am, the mainland power to the islands was re-energized and OPALCO began to bring the power to the island back up. They did this in phases to help protect the system. When the power goes out during such extreme temperatures, the grid must be managed carefully since picking up such a heavy load too quickly will overload the system. Since the mainland outage lasted so long and the outside temperatures remained so low, parts of the OPALCO system were overloaded resulting in smaller neighborhood outages. About 1200 meters remained without power through the night as OPALCO crews worked to repair and restore the localized system
outages. By Friday afternoon, most OPALCO members had their power restored.
This extended outage is a good reminder to be prepared for emergency events. Please visit the Department of Emergency Management for some great tips on being prepared for a variety of situations. For power outages, make sure you have back up batteries especially for critical medical equipment and cell phones, flashlights, and nonperishable food (see the full outage prep checklist at www.opalco.com).
Once an outage is underway, OPALCO staff update social media, the OPALCO website and the phone system. Please get your information directly from OPALCO as other sources can provide misleading or inaccurate information. Restoration times and causes of outages are difficult to communicate while the crews are in the field fixing the outage under extremely challenging conditions. The team often doesn’t know the extent of the damage until they are in the middle of fixing it and additional issues can arise as an outage progresses.
OPALCO appreciates members’ patience during these difficult times. OPALCO is incredibly grateful to our talented line crew and their commitment to keeping our lights on.
Orcas Power & Light Cooperative (OPALCO) is our member-owned cooperative electric utility, serving more than 11,400 members on 20 islands in San Juan County. OPALCO provides electricity that is 97% greenhouse-gas free and is generated predominantly by hydroelectric plants. OPALCO was founded in 1937.
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A suggestion/? Before telling us all we can just go to the OPALCO website and look up info on the latest power outage, please realize that: when the power is out, internet is out for most of us, as are cell phones. So the advice is moot and we are still in the dark – and cold, so cold, since so many dwellings here have only electric heat and no backup alternate heat. Bad situation.
Cell service via T Mobile was still available, so I could follow what was happening on my iPad.
As long as our electricity comes from off-island we will be increasingly subject to ” faulty equipment on Puget Sound Energy’s (PSE) transmission system” kinds of problems. Remember when some idiot over in Anacortes drove into a power pole and took out electricity to the whole county? How long do you think it would take to replace the submarine power cable if a tanker ship loses power and throws out an anchor, ripping it in half? If all you’ve got is a heat pump, you are going to be very, very cold for a long, long time!
This is the danger of CENTRALIZATION. In the increasingly frenetic corporate search for “efficiency” and “profitability” (both terms being in quotation marks because they are subject to many differing definitions), bigger goals, namely RELIABILITY and RESILIENCY, have been sacrificed. Because those don’t show up on quarterly reports. Let me ask you this: how much extra would you be willing to pay on your electric bill to have local on-island generation of energy? (Not counting the existing $50.35 “Service Access Charge” – which is the FEE you pay to have access to the grid whether you use 1 kilowatt or 100,000) Would you pay $50 on top of your actual usage in order to be disconnected from the mainland? $100? $200?
San Juan county is even more vulnerable to risks to our power supply than mainland counties. Witness whatever it was that PSE didn’t maintain or design properly that blew up and left us all in the dark. Or when BPA unilaterally decides to change the terms by which OPALCO purchases power from them. It is high time that we face the cold, frozen-hard fact that we cannot and should not rely on the mainland for electricity. BPA is glad to provide us cheap power but at the cost of salmon spawning streams, erratic supply and continued vulnerability to ever increasing natural and man-made disasters. The choice is ours: do you want unreliable and (for the moment) cheap power? Or do you want reliable and ecologically responsible power for the long term?
The only reasonable response to climate chaos and corporate malfeasance/irresponsibility is to take responsibility and control of our own electrical needs. We need to make a commitment to dispersed, local generation of all types. We will be glad we did when the Big One hits. Or BPA decides they don’t want to play ‘nice’ anymore.
Another mainland power outage this morning—not 24 hours later! From the OPALCO video, it looks like a large capacitor exploding. Hard to believe something like that cuts all power to the islands. Shows how vulnerable we are to mainland mishaps. We shouldn’t be.
I’m beginning to understand how the Ukrainians must feel in this brutal winter.
Ukranian towns and cities are being indiscriminately shelled, and their power generation facilities, specifically, are being targeted. It’s freezing now and it’ll continue through January. Food stuffs are limited. Wood cordage for heat is scarce in formally urban centers, though flammable wreckage has become plentiful.
Sub-optimally staffed, yet fully operational utility infrastructure have at least one thing that 4th generation-hybrid, war-ravaged states do not; namely, the promise that power will be restored in a timely, if inconvenient, manner.
What Ken Wood says – and he asks good questions Some will not be able to pay an extra 50 bucks a month, but still, we need to ask ourselves what it’s worth to have local control. And we need to weigh the advantages of public vs private coops, where we have zero control or say over what happens.
Considering that there have been recent attacks on the electric grid in Wa state down Tacoma way, and that these attacks are happening in other states, I don’t think we can assume anything in a world going mad – including speedy power restoration or convenience, if the excrement really hits the fan. And would we be told the truth anyway if it happened? What would cause a supply line to our submarine cable to explode? that’s what I was told happened in Sat’s outage; still no explanation of what happened in Thursday night’s outage.
All electric everything is the culprit. Every home and business needs backup heat at minimum.