CEO’s Message – October 2024
Mandatory Maintenance Outages
Many dedicated Wells Rural Electric Company employees work every day to keep the lights on. We are proud of our reliability record and the approach we take with preventive maintenance, improvement projects, and modernizing our system to deliver electricity to all our members.
The reality, though, is outages are inevitable. Last month, I talked about unplanned power outages and the impacts wildfires have on the Western United States. This month, I’m discussing the nature of scheduled outages.
Scheduled outages happen when the choice is made to intentionally take part of the system offline to perform maintenance, upgrades, or other work. We try to work hot (with the power still on) when it is safe to do so. When possible, we take shorter outages at the beginning and end of projects.
One message I want to emphasize, however, is that “scheduled” is almost never a synonym for “optional.” While there is never a good time to be without power, some times are worse than others. We do our best to schedule outages during the least inconvenient times.
Unfortunately, waiting until temperatures are more mild is not always possible.
When we say “scheduled,” what we often mean is, “The power isn’t out yet, but it will be if this isn’t fixed.” We need to start calling these types of outages “mandatory maintenance.”
A good example of this happened a couple of years ago when lightning struck a transmission pole north of Wells. The strike snapped, broke, and burned the pole and other wooden equipment. And yet, somehow, the structure was still standing, and the power was still on.
The damage required a scheduled outage, which was mandatory to fix our power infrastructure. We had a few hours to inform members of the outage before working with Idaho Power to get the structure rebuilt.
During a recent mandatory maintenance outage, our substation maintenance crew, and a highly-specialized contractor, tested the main transformer in the Carlin Substation. Members were understandably frustrated by a lengthy outage on a hot summer day to test the transformer and then another lengthy outage in September to make repairs. However, we could not risk the transformer failing during the winter months when swapping it out with a replacement transformer would have taken the power down for days.
Mandatory maintenance outages are part of doing business. As infrastructure ages and weathers, repairs and maintenance are inevitable. Sometimes, we can’t do that while the power is on.
Sometimes, as was the case a few winters ago, the work is being done on the transmission infrastructure outside of our system or by third parties. While we certainly advocate for our members during these times, as we did then, scheduling such outages is not always under our control.
Most scheduled outages are due to the availability of contractors or failing equipment. Crews spend significant time patrolling lines and planning system maintenance to identify and address hot spots before they become an issue. Even with that approach, we occasionally have a situation that needs immediate attention. These outages may be planned, but they are not optional. Putting them off increases the risk of longer outages when the weather and timing could be much worse.
Best wishes,
Thad S. Ballard
CEO
