Boulder’s Xcel community advisory panel gives feedback and wants answers on wildfire outages

On Tuesday, May 13, the Xcel Energy Partnership Community Advisory Panel provided feedback to representatives from Xcel Energy about the early April preemptive power outage. Many of the panel members’ concerns mirrored those expressed by Boulder City Council members to Robert Kenney, president of Xcel’s Colorado branch, on April 18.

Several panel members were confused about why some neighborhoods were without power while others weren’t, a question Boulder Reporting Lab found an answer to in the complex system of feeder lines. Others requested better communication, not just more advance warning of outages but also ways for Boulder residents who do not manage their own electric bills — like renters — to receive alerts before losing power.

Some wondered if burying power lines or reinforcing existing infrastructure to reduce future preemptive outages was a priority for Xcel. There was also interest in microgrids to enhance the resilience of Boulder’s electric grid and potentially decrease the number of residents affected by future preemptive outages.

The city’s wastewater treatment plant was mentioned, as it lost power and nearly caused sewage to spill into Boulder Creek, a situation first reported by Boulder Reporting Lab.

However, the most common question concerned the criteria for preemptive outages going forward. As panel member Andy Sayler asked, what models is Xcel using to determine whether a preemptive shutoff is necessary? Understanding this would clarify how frequently such outages might occur in the future.

“That’s going to feed very quickly into, what’s the likelihood of future events of this nature?” Sayler said. “It’s really hard to have a conversation about what reasonable mitigations are going to be if we don’t know if this is a one-year event, a 10-year event or a six-month event.”

Iffie Jennings, the Xcel representative at the meeting, reiterated what Kenney had told the Boulder City Council: Xcel has learned much from the outage, especially about communication. She stated that preemptive outages, which are contingent on factors like humidity, wind speeds, and red flag warnings indicating high fire risk, hopefully will not be frequent. While she did not provide specific criteria, she noted that Technosylva is the software currently used by Xcel Energy to assess wildfire risk.

“It is not a tool we are hoping to use often,” Jennings said. “It is just one of the tools in the toolbox when we look at wildfire mitigation.”

Read our coverage of the Xcel power outage.