Over the weekend during red flag warnings, about 200,000 Xcel Energy Colorado customers received notifications about their electricity status. Because of the blustery wind conditions and low moisture, Xcel implemented measures in some areas to decrease the risk of a wildfire.
In an email sent to customers around noon on March 2, Xcel explained that the change had to do with the electric grid’s attempt to reboot.
Typically, when there’s an incident causing a power outage on a line — like a tree branch touching a power line or lines swaying in strong winds — the grid’s equipment automatically works to restore power, “usually within a few seconds,” Xcel’s email said.
In other words, the grid acts like an automatic breaker box resetter. Instead of manually flipping a switch in a home breaker box, Xcel’s infrastructure handles those outages on its own.
But last weekend, “when there is an issue on the line,” Xcel wrote to customers, “the line will not automatically restore power until a crew can patrol the area to ensure it is safe to restore service.” This was the first time Xcel used the protocol outside a small pilot program, according to an Xcel spokesperson.
The extra precaution came 26 months after the Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history that killed two people. An investigation last year by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney’s Office and other government agencies claimed the fire was partially caused by an Xcel power line. Disconnected and moved by extreme winds on Dec. 30, 2021, the line generated sparks after touching other wires, investigators said. They said the sparks fell into the dry vegetation below and helped start the blaze. Xcel has vehemently denied this allegation.
More than 200 lawsuits have been filed against Xcel by insurers, homeowners and local governments alleging negligence against the utility. Among their arguments is that Xcel should have been prepared for the wind event that fueled the Marshall Fire considering how long it has been operating in the Boulder area.
In a lawsuit filed on behalf of dozens of insurance companies, plaintiffs alleged that Xcel, aware of frequent high winds along the Front Range, neglected to take preventative measures during high-risk weather conditions. Specifically, the suit claimed Xcel “did not de-energize its Electrical Equipment prior to the onset of the windstorm.”
This past weekend, Xcel deliberately chose not to automatically restore power to disrupted lines. That way, presumably, if a line had fallen in dry vegetation or was at risk of creating sparks through contact with other lines, it wouldn’t have put the nearby landscape at risk of incineration.
One outage over the weekend lasted about 100 minutes and affected roughly 500 customers. In an email on March 4, Xcel told customers the conditions putting the company on high alert had sufficiently subsided, allowing the company to resume normal operations.
“Overall, the system performed very well this weekend,” according to an Xcel statement provided to Boulder Reporting Lab.
The Xcel spokesperson said the change in protocol was not related to the Marshall Fire or the lawsuits. The spokesperson referred to the company’s Wildfire Mitigation Program that supported this work and has received $450 million in funding since 2019 to “protect lives, homes and Colorado’s forests from the threat of wildfire.”
An Xcel subsidiary operating in Texas is now also being sued by a fire victim for allegedly starting the still-raging Smokehouse Creek Fire on the Texas Panhandle, which has killed at least two people and has become the largest in Texas history at more than a million acres. The suit alleges a fallen Xcel utility pole started the wildfire. Xcel has said the cause of the fire is still unknown and is currently under investigation.
Having been through a 2010 wildfire where the power abruptly went off without any warning, effectively cutting me off from communication, I was pleased to see that Xcel took 14 years, but they do learn: this potential ‘safety shutdown’ was orchestrated by both phone messages and emails, letting us know that power might be interrupted. I have been vocalizing the courtesy of allowing subscribers to know for 14 years. So, you can teach an old dog new tricks, but it could take a very long time.
David,
The detached wire in the Marshall Fire was reported internally at Xcel within the year preceding the fire, but the line was not fixed. After the fire, a “Do Not Repair” order, also internal, was generated, but the wire was repaired anyway on Jan. 3, destroying the evidence. The reason given was that the current was needed for maintaining heat in supplied houses so that their pipes would not freeze. However it would have been cheaper to hotel the residents, repair water damage and cut the electricity than allow the current to run on a known detached wire to accelerate into a $2B cost. So Xcel was absolved of responsibility. Michael Dougherty would not prosecute for criminal negligence for violating the DNR order. It was the residents that took the hit with lawsuits and consequent low payouts on their insurance policies under civil cases instead of a deep pocket perpetrator. PG&E went bankrupt in the California fires, but electric supply was reconstituted legally without deeper insult to the resident customers.
On Dec. 30, when I finally got back from my 10:30 AM dental appointment at 5:30 PM on my bike, I came home to find a tree had downed a wire. My power was not interrupted and it was pure luck it didn’t start another fire. It seems that cutting the current was the least they could have done, but it was two days before Xcel even sent a subcontractor to liberate the wire, which was tethered by the tree about 4 ft. from the ground. I was tied up at Community Cycles getting my bike fixed from being blown over, but my neighbors called Xcel when it fell, so it wasn’t as if they didn’t know.
In the Lahaina, Maui fire the current was not cut either, for reasons of pumping water to fight the fire, with similar negative trade-off results. So isn’t it interesting that now Xcel is warning of power outages in case of wildfire before anything even happens? I’m not saying this isn’t good. It is. But it’s evidence that Xcel is very cognizant of the effects of their complicity in either directly causing or acceleration of a pre-existing fire.
I was fairly pleased by the text notification that I got about their fire mitigation steps. If I’d needed additional preparation for that long outage, it gave me the time to do that prep.
I’m glad they’re taking these steps to prevent wildfires. I assume that their denying any relation to the Marshall fire is for liability reasons (so they’re not accepting blame). I hope this new measure doesn’t come back to bite them, because I don’t want anyone to be disincentivized from doing the right thing.
I think this is a good thing and I hope they continue it. We don’t need electric power every single minute of our lives if the result is wild fires.