Foster Campbell (center) discusses a recent SWEPCO power outage with Lanny Nickell and Brett Mattison.

Coping with an emergency power outage by SWEPCO

On April 28, Louisiana Public Utilities Commissioner Foster Campbell held a news conference in his Shreveport office to discuss the power outage that occurred on April 26 in parts of Bossier and Caddo parishes.

The event was described as an emergency outage by SWEPCO ordered by Southwest Power Pool (SPP).

SPP acts as the balancing authority and reliability coordinator for a 14-state region that includes SWEPCO’s service area in parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas to maintain the integrity of the grid, which delivers electrical energy to homes and businesses.

On April 26, SPP ordered SWEPCO to immediately drop the electric “load” to a swath of the ArkLaTex.

Campbell’s office heard about it immediately; power even went out at the commissioner’s residence. And on Monday, April 28, he was looking for answers.

“We had a real problem over the weekend,” he noted, and said he had questions he wanted to ask of Lanny Nickell, president and CEO of SPP, and Brian Mattison, president and CEO of SWEPCO.

“We want to know what caused the problems and what changes are needed to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?

“And this is what I want to know. Who’s going to pay for the damages? There’s a lot of damages. People have businesses that depend on retail businesses, especially restaurants.”

Mattison and Nickell explained that a series of circumstances coincided to cause the problem. Unusually warm weekend weather created a higher-than-expected demand for power. Unfortunately, the power available then was insufficient to meet the demand. To protect the electric power grid, SPP ordered SWEPCO to cut power off immediately.

“Interrupting your services was not a step that we took lightly,” Nickell said. “We appreciate that doing this affects people’s lives and livelihoods. And it’s a step we only take as a last resort to minimize the risk of even worse outages that would be more widespread and much more impactful.”

He said there were clear and direct threats to the power grid that originated in a particular area of Bossier Parish and could have resulted in a cascade of outages across the SWEPCO region if unchecked. While an estimated 32,000 SWEPCO customers lost power for as many as six hours that evening, Nickell said that had SWEPCO not dropped power to the affected area, the number of affected customers could have been as high as 300,000.

“It starts shutting itself down,” Nickell explained, “and then it would shut generators down, and it could have been a long time before we could ever get the system back up. So, that’s a last resort measure that we had to take. It’s unfortunate, but fortunately, we didn’t have the grid burn in two at certain places.”

Mattison and Nickell explained that the lack of power to meet demand was due to the need to periodically maintain their generating equipment so it’s ready when needed.

Mattison said that all the available forecasts indicated that the power demand that weekend would allow for maintenance without negatively impacting customers.

“What are we going to tell those 30,000 people who lost their power?” Campbell asked. “That’s not going to happen again? Can y’all sit up here today and say that won’t happen again?”

To this, Nickell replied, “We can’t guarantee that it’s never going to happen again.”

“I don’t get the best feeling about what you’re telling these people,” Campbell said. “I don’t get a warm feeling that this might happen again. Is it a month or two months? Or are you talking about five years or 10 years? Give us some kind of better feeling than it might happen again.”

Mattison responded that the maintenance of offline generators was almost complete. “We’re getting ready to bring those generators online that have been offline.”

According to Nickell, whose organization is responsible for keeping track of such data, “If all the generation that’s available to us, not counting the stuff that’s offline right now, if all of this generation can be returned to service, as we expect it will be, this summer we should be able to survive because we have sufficient excess generation to serve summer peak conditions.”

Campbell made his position clear. “People were without electricity for whatever reason. I don’t want to have this conference again. I expect y’all to come up with some damages for people who were without electricity. I don’t know how you’re going to do it. But there’s some way these people have to be paid back for the money they lost during the outages.

“And we’re going to work with SWEPCO and SPP to find out what y’all are going to do about it. I expect some money to reimburse these people for outages that cost them money, and somehow, we’re going to figure out a way to do that.”