Outage Restoral Progress for 2-16-2021
Major repairs were completed on the following circuits/areas today:
Buckholts - Davilla Feeder and Buckholts Feeder: Crews have restored approximately 465 meters.
Pleasant Grove - Highbank: Crews have restored approximately 269 meters.
Midway - Durango area: Approximately 124 meters were restored.
Barclay - Red Ranger/Cyclone area: Crews were able to fix an issue that restored power to approximately 28 meters.
Staff and crew are continuing to do everything possible 24/7. Huge thanks to our linemen, staff, members, contractors, other co-ops aiding us, warehouse, and volunteers for assisting us in these extreme circumstances. The linemen continue to work in difficult and extreme conditions, thanks, gentlemen for everything
02/16/21 5:40 p.m.
Distribution Restoration UPDATE - "POLES and WIRES"
Outages that will most likely not come back on tonight and caused by POLES and WIRES being damaged are:
Ratibor Circuit - Barclay 2403 - ***** 330 meters ******** Numerous Poles are Down and Track Machines are Sinking********
Durango - Midway 2401 ***20 meters**** - We are trying to reach this but the terrain is keeping us from it. We will continue to try, but we are not certain we can get it back on tonight.
**** North Elm Road - Barclay 2401 - ****8 meters***** - 10 spans of wire down. Still have to string wire poles are set. -
We are trying to restore these outages before we run out of daylight, but chances are not great for these 3 outages.
We still have some single outages spread around the territory and are trying to get to those as well when crews are available. Some of these have blown transformers and fuses. Normally we can take care of the fuses, but sometimes transformers become an issue. It's on a case-by-case basis.
**********If you are part of any of these outages and have medical conditions or in need of critical care, please let us know. Once the guys are on their way back in. I will have anyone with available seating capacity pick you up and bring you back to our McGregor or Rosebud Office************
**** If we have members that have four-wheel drives and tractors that can help move these people around please let us know.*****
***** We can only hold so many and don't have too much food but we will take in all we can. We have generators and heat****
***** If you can get to any of the people that post to this and need help please help them. If you have heat take them in*******
I'm turning this over to my staff. This is my last post for the evening. Please help each other.
ERCOT Update 02/16/21
ERCOT has released another 1MW approximately "100 homes" of load to us.
Our shed obligation is now 20.8MW's. That is approximately 2,080 homes they are dispatching for us to continue rolling.
I do not wish to create false expectations. They are releasing load back to us now, most likely because solar generation is picking up. Once the sun goes down, if the wind does not pick up, the severity of the rolling black outs will increase. I have not had time to check recently, but I do not think they have been able to ramp enough thermal units (coal and gas) up to carry the load.
This is impacting all utilities across the state.
IOU's – Investor-Owned Utilities
MOU's - Municipal Owned Utilities
Cooperatives - Member Owned Utilities
Each utility is obligated to shed its share of the load based on the size of their peak demand. Since we are smaller in scale, we do not have to shed as much load "mega-watts" because our peaks are not as high as the extremely large utilities. However, our members are suffering based on our share and obligation. Most of the metro areas have had to lock-out load-in certain geographic areas because their obligation is so large, and they could not handle the magnitude of their obligation due to being such a large percentage of the ERCOT market. That means much of the metro areas are not rolling blackouts. They are blackouts.
Use this link as a resource to see how many people are out by county.
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
I will be posting another Distribution "Poles and Wires" update soon. I'm waiting for operations and dispatch to update me.
