Could they have done better? There’s always room for improvement in the way a utility prepares for and responds to widespread power outages caused by snow, wind and ice storms.
It’s incumbent upon the utilities to thoroughly review their response to the mid-January storm and fine-tune their emergency response plans for next time. One thing is certain: There will be a next time.
Puget Sound Energy customers, especially those in the South Sound area, were hit hardest by the storm. PSE outages peaked at 270,000 the evening of Jan. 19 and power wasn’t restored to everyone in the utility’s service territory until early morning Jan. 26.
Some people were without electricity for a week. Some never lost power or experienced power outages that only lasted a few hours.
In a multi-faceted storm such as the one that hit in January, Mother Nature can be very random and hard to predict. Clearly, the delivery of snow, ice and wind to south King, Pierce and Thurston counties posed a major challenge to the utility. In Thurston County alone, some 90 percent of the utility’s transmission lines failed. That compares with 50 percent of the transmission lines in the utility’s service area in King and Pierce counties.
Transmission lines are the lifeblood of the electrical grid, carrying power from power supplies to the local substations. The statistics suggest Thurston County was on the verge of a complete blackout, something that hasn’t happened since the Inauguration Day storm of 1993.
Unlike some of its neighboring utilities, such as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Power, Puget Sound Energy’s service territory includes many remote, forested areas in Western Washington. Power lines that stretch for miles through heavily wooded areas many only serve a few dozen customers.
Further complicating matters, the January storm played out like a heavyweight fight — blow after blow after blow over several days. It wasn’t like a typical windstorm, which lasts a few hours, then relents enough to allow utility line crews to start rebuilding the system,
During the storm and the days immediately following, the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission received 29 complaints from customers who couldn’t get through to PSE on their emergency customer service phone line. Obviously, not everyone who had trouble calling in complained. However, considering the hundreds of thousands of customers in the dark, that’s not an inordinate number of complaints.
Here’s something to consider for those who harbor resentment about how the storm response played out: PSE is a private utility. For every minute a customer is without electricity, the utility is losing money. An investor-owned utility with a profit margin allowed by the WUTC has all the financial incentive it needs to restore power as aggressively and quickly as possible.
In the vast majority of cases, falling trees and limbs triggered the power outages by damaging power lines, transformers and other electrical equipment.
Imagine how many trees would have to be removed from public rights-of-way and private property to make the utility corridors risk free. It’s unlikely that the public would be willing to sacrifice the number of trees it would take to increases system reliability in a storm.
Then why not built the transmission and distribution system underground?
Cost is a major reason. Utility officials suggest underground lines are eight times more expensive than overhead lines – $4 million per mile compared to $500,000. And when underground lines fail, its not so easy to find the source of the problem. Outages would be less frequent, but they could last longer when they do happen.
Again, there is always room for improvement in how a utility responds in the aftermath of a storm. There are lessons to be learned from the January storm, lessons to help hasten recovery efforts the next time the region is slammed by some combination of wind, snow and ice.
