Residents still asked to conserve energy
While officials are cautiously optimistic about the power supply, they said today that Kansas and surrounding states are not quite out of the woods yet. Residents are still asked to conserve energy.
The power situation improved on Wednesday afternoon, with the Southwest Power Pool, a 14-state region, downgrading the energy emergency alert to Level 1. But then, at 6:20 p.m. Wednesday, the SPP upgraded the alert to Level 2.
Later, at around 11 p.m. Wednesday, the SPP downgraded it to Level 1, saying there is currently sufficient energy to meet demands.
The SPP directed its member companies, which include the utilities in the Kansas City area, to issue public conservation appeals.
At the Board of Public Utilities’ 6 p.m. meeting Wednesday, Jerry Ohmes, manager of electric supply at the BPU, explained why power was in such short supply and how the BPU had handled the crisis.
Ohmes said the cause was the extremely cold weather that took place over the past week or so through the center of the nation.
“What really was suffering was natural gas,” he said. Natural gas was being supplied to generators and also was competing with residential customers and a lot of businesses using that resource, he said.
“They couldn’t get gas out of the ground because of the freeze-offs,” he said. “That’s really hurt the power grid.”
The same frigid temperatures made it difficult for coal and oil generation as well, when equipment is trying to run in the extreme temperatures, he said.
Before 2014, the BPU was its own balancing authority, Ohmes said, with its own power generation to offset its own customer demands. But that balancing responsibility was transferred to the Southwest Power Pool in 2014 for a 14-state region, he said.
The Southwest Power Pool has never had to use its energy emergency alerts, but they have had the mechanism to relieve issues with the transmission grid when capacity margin is compromised, he said.
Level 1 alerts dictate that all member utilities have all of their available generation online, and available to them, he said. Level 2 includes load management procedures to be put into effect, with public appeals to reduce the load. Level 3 is load interruption is imminent or in progress, with the mandated outages.
“We’ve experienced all three of those, moved forward and backward the past couple days,” he said.
Ohmes went over the timeline of events. At 9:19 a.m. Sunday, the SPP issued its first energy emergency alert, and all the BPU’s generation went online at that time, he said.
They escalated it at 7:42 a.m. Monday to energy emergency alert Level 2, and public appeals went out.
The BPU staff started calling key industrial customers in Kansas City, Kansas, asking them to reduce their energy consumption, he said.
Then, at 10:22 a.m. Monday, SPP issued energy emergency alert Level 3, and BPU was instructed to shed load, he said.
The BPU was told to shed 6 megawatts, he said, and it worked to find a breaker that would have 6 megawatts and not have a critical load on it. They made sure hospitals were not in these areas.
At 1:01 p.m., the BPU was instructed by SPP to restore the load that had been shed. Then they went to energy emergency level 3 until 2 p.m., and downgraded to Level 2.
At 6:21 a.m. Tuesday, SPP issued Level 3 again, and at 6:44 a.m. BPU was told to shed 13 megawatts of load, he said. They did so in 40-minute increments and cycles, he said. They felt that 40-minute segments would not make homes or businesses too cold.
At 7:17 a.m. they were notified by SPP to shed an additional 13 megawatts, for a total of 26 megawatts, Ohmes said.
At 9:32 a.m. Tuesday, SPP issued a restore order with instructions for the initial 13 megawatts, and they did that. At 10:07 a.m. Tuesday, they received an SPP directive to restore the remaining 13 megawatts.
Then at 11:31 a.m., SPP downgraded the energy emergency alert from Level 2 to Level 1.
But again, SPP upgraded the energy emergency alert at 6:26 p.m. Tuesday from a Level 1 to a Level 2. That continued to 1:15 p.m. Wednesday, when SPP downgraded it to Level 1, he said.
Ohmes noted that during the BPU meeting Wednesday night, he received another upgrade from SPP at 6:20 p.m. that the alert is now in Level 2.
“Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess,” he said. “We’re back to public appeals.”
Although they’re not through this yet, it looks better for the days ahead, he said, with temperatures getting warmer.
Ohmes said on Monday, SPP mentioned importing 6,000 megawatts from a neighboring interconnect, but on Tuesday, they were only importing 4,000 megawatts from neighboring interconnects.
Ohmes said a lot of facilities in the south were not weatherproofed for extreme weather. If they didn’t balance generation to load, the generation would be out of whack, and cascading outages could take days to restore if not weeks, he said. The outages of Monday and Tuesday prevented more serious outages from occurring.
BPU board members asked about staff preparation for a situation like this. Ohmes said they had a manual load shed plan if the need ever arose for it, but in the past, they had not had to use this plan.
Rose Mulvany Henry, a BPU member, wanted to know if the BPU could get the information out to customers faster, asking them to conserve energy. She thought the BPU needed to react more quickly.
Bill Johnson, BPU general manager, said when the emergency alert went to Level 2, the BPU started contacting industrial customers directly by phone to reduce their usage. A lot of them said there was only so much they could do. But one customer was planning an outage and moved it up a day or day and a half to help reduce the usage, he said.
BPU also contacted the UG and asked them to conserve as much as they could. The UG shut down a lot of operations starting Monday, he said. Some were already shut down for the Presidents Day holiday then, but they shut down further. Employees worked from home.
The UG employees continued working from home on Wednesday. The UG sent out an advisory on Wednesday evening that it expected buildings to reopen on Thursday.
Johnson said load-setting is a moving target and they don’t know where they’re going from day to day, sometimes not knowing within the day. He said there were some lessons learned from this experience and they will be having conversations on how to increase its technology to reach customers with the message.
Johnson said equipment does not always operate correctly, and that is why some customers’ power was off longer than 40 minutes. Across the city, breakers are sometimes slow to open and close, he said, because of the extreme weather conditions.
Ohmes said customers in the Armourdale and Barber areas had a power outage longer than the BPU wanted. Equipment malfunctioned and a breaker got stuck, he said.
Johnson told board members that when the BPU made telephone calls about the pandemic to all of its customers last year, it took three days to contact every customer.
The topic of the power supply also came up at the governor’s news conference at 4 p.m. Wednesday.
Andrew French, chairman of the Kansas Corporation Commission, said Wednesday that although there was every indication there might have been additional power outages on Wednesday morning, they made it through the peak with the Southwest Power Pool having enough energy to meet the demand.
He said energy use on Wednesday came in lower than forecast.
That means conservation measures by Kansas residents and businesses are likely making the difference here from power outages.
Around midday Wednesday, French said the SPP sent out a message that the alert had dropped to the EEA1 level, two notches below calling for coordinated power outages, so they stepped off the ledge a bit.
He said he was still concerned about the possibility of power outages late in the afternoon and on Thursday morning. He asked residents to continue conservation measures.
He also said electric generating plants in Kansas have been running really hard for a couple of weeks, and if they lose major generation sources, they could have further interruptions in the future. As temperatures warm, the strain on the energy system will ease, he said.
He said he is cautiously optimistic but reminded residents they are still under emergency conditions.
The governor’s news conference, with Andrew French, is at https://www.facebook.com/GovLauraKelly/videos/179149120309819.