After Xcel Energy preemptively cut power during the April 6-7 wind storm, the state’s Public Utilities Commission opened an investigation into how the company conducted those outages. In a filing published June 11, the commission reiterated what Boulder Reporting Lab has covered extensively: The communication and collaboration from Xcel with local governments and customers were lacking.
The filing also noted the estimated financial losses for Boulder businesses: $1.3 to $1.4 million in revenue, $240,000 in wages and $125,000 in inventory. These figures came from a survey of businesses by the Boulder Chamber and Downtown Boulder Partnership.
The utility cut power to roughly 55,000 customers to prevent high winds from starting a wildfire via damaged powerlines. Nearly two-thirds of those customers were in the City of Boulder. The execution of the outage was widely criticized, including by city officials, who said they received inadequate notice to prepare.
Power was abruptly cut to critical facilities, including medical centers, assisted living homes, the homeless shelter in North Boulder and the city’s drinking water and wastewater treatment plants. Businesses were caught off guard, and restaurants reported significant food spoilage. Emails obtained by Boulder Reporting Lab revealed city officials’ confusion as they rushed to prevent raw sewage from entering Boulder Creek after the wastewater treatment plant lost power. The outage lasted nearly three days for some city residents. It was Xcel Colorado’s first preventive wildfire safety power shutdown in the state.
The chaos and revenue losses sparked calls for accountability in Boulder and across the state, including from Gov. Polis, and triggered the PUC to investigate Xcel’s wildfire safety protocols, customer communications and community engagement during the outage.
The PUC’s main request to Xcel is to establish a protocol for handling any outages needed in the next nine months to avoid fires before the company’s Wildfire Mitigation Plan is enacted.
While Xcel Energy is expected to file its mitigation plan with the PUC soon, it isn’t expected to be in place until 2025. The plan will cover everything from where it intends to underground lines to how it can be more “surgical” in its deployment of public safety power shutoffs.
In the meantime, the PUC has requested that Xcel develop an interim plan for preemptive outages — procedures like getting affected communities more detailed maps of the outage areas, working with municipalities ahead of time to ensure critical infrastructure won’t be impacted, and exploring means for restoring power once the extreme event has passed.
“We encourage the Company to adopt the mantra of ‘transparency’ in every process and method it employs as part of a comprehensive, thoughtful plan that begins well before the occurrence of an event,” the PUC said in its filing.
After the outage, the PUC fielded more than 700 comments from the public on their experiences during the outage and held hearings with Xcel to understand the reasons behind their actions. The commissioners also met with the directors of emergency and disaster management for the three counties affected by the outage: Boulder, Jefferson and Larimer. While Lori Hodges, the director of emergency management for Larimer County, said communication from Xcel was adequate, representatives from Boulder and Jefferson County voiced frustration, according to the filing.
Nathan Whittington, Jefferson County’s manager of emergency management, didn’t learn about the outage until two hours before the press conference announcing it, and only because he was invited to participate in the press conference.
“The central theme from the emergency management directors was the importance of early, frequent, accurate, and consistent communications between Public Service [Xcel] and local governments,” the filing states.
In Boulder, in addition to expressing frustration over Xcel’s execution of the outage and limited notice, Mike Chard, Boulder’s director of the Office of Disaster Management, questioned the necessity of the outage, saying the fire risk on April 6 was low to moderate. This assessment was shared by Brian Oliver, the city’s wildland fire chief.
Xcel previously told Boulder Reporting Lab that it had “full confidence” that its planned outage avoided a wildfire based on downed powerlines in the county.
The commission has requested a response from Xcel on an interim plan for public safety shutoffs by June 30.
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