Boulder County residents may have differing opinions about whether Xcel Energy should have cut power on April 6 to lessen wildfire risk. But there’s widespread agreement that the situation was marred by confusion from poor communication that posed its own hazard.
Confusion arose as some neighborhoods experienced power outages lasting over 24 hours, while nearby areas remained unaffected. The pattern of outages seemed random: Areas with underground powerlines were sometimes spared, while others with similar infrastructure faced blackouts. Critical facilities serving vulnerable populations — like Foothills Hospital, Frasier Meadows assisted living and the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless — lost power often with minimal warning, even as adjacent buildings had electricity. Despite being powered by two substations for redundancy, the city’s water treatment plant lost power, prompting urgent efforts to stop raw sewage from entering Boulder Creek.
Compounding the confusion, a blurry map Xcel Energy shared with media hours after the shutdown incorrectly showed all of Boulder without power.
So why did the outages appear as a patchwork that, on the surface, seemed too random to be part of a wildfire prevention strategy?
Xcel points to the nature of the electric grid, though even the utility has admitted to lapses in its communications. “The energy infrastructure is a pretty complex system,” Andrew Holder, director of community affairs with Xcel Energy, told Boulder Reporting Lab.
Boulder’s electric grid is complicated and fragmented, shaped by the city’s age and the way homes and buildings were added over time. This tangled network consists of substations and feeder lines that extend like tentacles to convey power to just a few customers or up to several hundred. As Boulder grew, more feeder lines were added to accommodate new developments, creating a layout that bewilders residents during outages. Even though your neighbor is right next door, they might be connected to a different feeder, explaining why some homes lost power last weekend while others nearby did not.
“Imagine something of a spiderweb look that grows over time as development happens,” Carolyn Elam, sustainability senior manager with the City of Boulder, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “Imagine this happening over more than a century as growth and infill occurs.”
Elam illustrated the grid’s complexity with a story about her neighbor’s new garage. Because there wasn’t enough capacity to power the garage, Xcel switched her neighbor’s service to a feeder powering a nearby apartment building. As a result, during an outage, Elam might have electricity, while her nextdoor neighbor, living in the same style home, might not.
The randomness of the feeder lines might explain why some areas, even those without any apparent fire risk, experienced power outages. Feeders can be miles long, and without access to Xcel’s infrastructure maps — withheld for security reasons — residents can’t trace the feeders’ paths to or from their homes. Nor can they ascertain whether there’s a wildfire risk along those feeder lines.
For example, a feeder might start at a substation in Boulder Canyon with overhead lines and then go underground to supply power to an area downtown.
“You can be in that downtown block and see no overhead lines,” Elam said, “but it was the area of the feeder farther up in the canyon that was overhead that was the wildfire concern.”
Holder of Xcel said that the preemptive power cuts, even in areas with buried lines, reduced wildfire risk. In addition to electric poles snapped by the wind north of Boulder heading to Lyons, Holder mentioned “significant damage” to powerlines near Eldorado Canyon, close to where the Marshall Fire began.
“We have full confidence in saying that we did mitigate wildfire risk by systematically de-energizing,” Holder said.
Lapsed communication sent the city scrambling, threatened to put vulnerable people at risk
The community’s greatest frustration was with Xcel’s communications around the shutoffs, with unclear communication to everyone from restaurant owners to senior living facilities. Even the City of Boulder and Boulder County’s Office of Disaster Management was forced to operate with far less information than it needed to ensure public safety.
“There was a lack of critical communication,” said Sarah Huntley, a spokesperson for ODM.
Huntley said ODM first learned about the possibility of preemptive outages at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 5. The director of ODM asked Xcel about the specifics of the shutdown, including locations, timing and the criteria Xcel was using to preemptively de-energize. But by 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 6, ODM only received “a very vague note,” according to Huntley. The note said that power would be shut off at 3 p.m. that day, without “any maps or any guidance as to which parts of the system would be shut down,” she said.
She said Xcel acknowledged its communication could have been better. She suggested the insufficient communication could have stemmed from Xcel being caught off guard by the extreme wind conditions. While Xcel had been working on a wildfire mitigation strategy, she said, it had not yet ironed out the details when last weekend’s winds triggered the possible use of preemptive outages — “the tool of last resort,” according to Holder from Xcel.
“I think they were caught a little bit off guard with needing to implement this particular strategy before they had had a chance to daylight it with impacted communities,” Huntley said.
Huntley said that ODM and the City of Boulder have told Xcel that more dialogue needs to happen, both about its preemptive shutdown strategy but also before major weather events. The goal is to incorporate input from those working with vulnerable communities. While wildfire poses an obvious danger, power outages also have consequences.
“There’s a tendency to look at power outages, especially those that might last a few hours, as an inconvenience,” Huntley said. “But really, we understand that for businesses and restaurant owners in particular, critical infrastructure facilities like hospitals and nursing homes, and the more vulnerable residents we have in our community who don’t have the income to be able to replace two weeks worth of groceries, outages actually have a real significant impact on people.”
Foothills Hospital and Frasier Meadows senior living facility were both without power for some time. There’s a possibility city officials could have coordinated with Xcel to maintain power for those critical facilities.
The wind event did pose a wildfire risk, however, raising questions about how to balance community safety with the use of this shutdown tool in the future.
Huntley emphasized the need for backup systems to protect essential services like Boulder’s wastewater treatment plant, which does not have generators and instead relies on dual substations for power. Both substations experienced outages, nearly leading to raw sewage overflow into Boulder Creek, underscoring the importance of planning and coordination with Xcel.
“We counted on Xcel’s assurances that there would not be situations where both substations would go down at one time,” Huntley said. “We did find ourselves in a situation of some stress, Saturday afternoon, because there was no power at that facility.”
Huntley said that thanks to a tank being offline for construction, staff were able to divert sewage into the empty tank to buy enough time to contact Xcel and get one of the plant’s power sources back on. She suggested earlier communication might have helped remind Xcel of the plant’s critical power needs.
Even as Xcel introduces preemptive power outages for wildfire prevention, it’s also exploring other strategies to reduce wildfire risk without resorting to shutoffs. According to Holder from Xcel, this includes burying power lines, reinforcing overhead lines to be fire-resistant, and installing sectionalizers to isolate outages to specific areas.
“There’s a number of different things we can continue to do to advance the technology on our energy grid,” Holder said. “And we’ll continue to employ those over the years to come.”
The post Why did your neighbor have power and you didn’t? Boulder’s grid complexity exacerbates confusion over Xcel Energy’s wildfire safety outage appeared first on The Boulder Reporting Lab.