Last Friday morning at about 6:30, an equipment failure at a Rocky Mountain Power substation briefly left some Roy residents without electricity.
RMP switched those residents onto another electrical circuit, but it was a temporary fix — leaving those additional customers on the secondary circuit would eventually cause an overload. To repair the damage at the substation, a temporary outage was scheduled, which left about 3,000 people without power — and thus without air conditioning during a period of sweltering heat — for about 10 hours.
Many were irate, telling FOX 13 they were under the impression that Rocky Mountain Power had scheduled some routine maintenance during the middle of a heat wave without giving any prior notification.
RMP spokesperson Tiffany Erickson told The Salt Lake Tribune on Sunday that wasn’t the case.
“They missed that [it] was an emergency interruption,” Erickson said, “and we really need to make that repair or we were looking at additional equipment failures, which could result in prolonged outages and even a greater number of impacted customers.”
As horribly inconvenient as power outages are during the kind of hot stretch Utah is in, such heat waves produce the perfect confluence of circumstances that bring them about.
“In the summer, the peak customer need for power is directly related to temperature,” Erickson said. “And that’s tough on the system.”
Erickson provided a brief explainer on how and why heat waves produce outages, best practices for customers to de-stress the system (and save some money), and how to be better prepared for future outages.
Why do high temperatures cause power outages?
When temperatures are consistently high, people tend to run their air conditioner units nonstop.
And that power usage eventually leads to a drain on the system.
“What really creates the stress is where you’ve got hot temperatures that don’t go below 70 degrees,” Erickson said. “At night, when you have cooler temperatures and folks can shut down their ACs and let the night air cool off [their homes], that gives the system a break, instead of running constant, all day and all night. That’s what’s most stressful to the system.
“We’re constantly monitoring our system, looking for those hot spots. When I say hot spots, it’s circuits that are running close to capacity. You have [only] so much capacity on how many customers can get electricity from one circuit,” she added. “And so if they’re pulling too much, and if you’re going over 90%, 100%, that’s when you get an overloaded circuit, and then you get damage, and have fuses blowing and things like that.”
What can be done to limit such outages?
The power company is drawing on years of data as it tries to analyze and predict, to forecast peak usage times and to load balance.
Company experts constantly monitor those circuits, and shift customers from circuits on the verge of overload to those with lower usage.
However, there are behaviors that customers can adopt to help the system along.
“Throttle back a bit,” Erickson said, “and conserve power.”
For starters, check the weather forecasts daily. When temperatures have been consistently high, people get into a rut of assuming that will continue, and they leave their AC units on constantly. Check to see if there are some of those sub-70 nights coming up, and if there are, open up your windows and give your cooling unit a rest.
And if there aren’t?
Well, first off, “keep sunlight out of your home at all costs,” Erickson said. Yes, sunlight is beautiful and vibrant, but it will also heat up your house. So close the blinds and the curtains and the shutters as much as you can.
Furthermore, Erickson added, most people could stand to have their homes a bit warmer than what they are. What’s your thermostat set to? It’s probably too low.
“We tell people the optimum temperature to set your AC to is 78 degrees,” she said.
That’s still pretty warm, Erickson acknowledges, and some people will find that insufferable. So if that’s simply too hot for you to accept?
“Use fans,” she said. “You’re moving air around and you can be pretty comfortable. And that’s a ton less energy than actually using your AC unit.”
And finally, avoid using large appliances — ovens, dryers, dishwashers — during peak hours, or at all, if possible. They not only guzzle energy, but they also bring heat into the home.
Be better prepared for outages
Even if everyone employed all those aforementioned best practices, it’s inevitable that power outages will occur. Sometimes it’s nature acting up. Other times it’s equipment malfunctions. Sometimes accidents occur.
What should people do to be prepared so that when outages occur like the one in Roy, they can manage it with minimal obstruction?
Adhering to and being prepared for general emergency guidelines is a good start, Erickson said. Which is to say, have enough food and water to last 72 hours and, if possible, have an alternate location where you can spend some time.
Beyond that, though, put yourself in a situation to access information.
Have backup batteries for your phone and laptop. Make sure your contact information is up to date with your power company, so that it can send you updates via either emails, text messages or phone calls. Perhaps have your power company’s mobile app downloaded on your cell, so you can receive push notifications letting you know if power will be restored in one hour or five.
“Information is just so valuable, and it’s just something you don’t really think of until there’s an outage,” Erickson said. “And it’s definitely key updating that information so we can reach out to customers. Those are the big messages we have for folks.”
