Power Problems: Outages in Fargo

There were several power outages within a two-week span in Fargo. We wondered if these were signs of bigger problems within the power system or just because of the recent warmer weather. For answers, we spoke with Mark Nisbet, North Dakota Manager for Xcel Energy, to find out what they’ve learned about the outages.

High Plains Reader: There have been a lot of outages in the Fargo area in the last few weeks. Can you tell me how many and why this is happening?

Mark Nisbet: Over the last two weeks now, we’ve had seven different outages. What’s discouraging about them is that we are inconveniencing customers. We are working hard to get ahead of it. We’re working hard on replacing some underground cable.

One of the outages was a stretch of cable that went from our substation close to downtown, through downtown and then over into the Minnesota side. That cable faulted two days in a row. When it faulted the second time, we made the decision to really jump into it and replace that cable. So that’s about 3500 feet of cable we’ll replace there, work through the weekend and that’s at more than halfway through to completion, that stretch of cable.

A number of different things caused the outages. We had a lightning strike on one insulator. This morning, we had a pole fire. Now the positive thing about that, if you can say there is such a thing, it normally would’ve affected 1300 customers. Because we’ve installed some of the smart grid technology, it immediately restored service to 1100 customers and had it down to the 200 customers that were impacted.

One outage we still haven’t pinned down. We were having to make some adjustments where the load was carried and we made a switching process that it normally would work fine but it triggered an outage. We couldn’t figure out if there was a weak switch or a problem.

What you’re hearing is there are a number of things that have led to this. So it isn’t if we correct one thing. We’ve accelerated our tree-trimming efforts but we had the one area where a tree had rubbed to the point where it had weakened one of the strands of wire, that let loose and fell into the conductor below it.

It’s been a rash of outages. We agree with people that it’s been too many. We are going to jump into replacement efforts where needed. We’re going to work on a strategy for pole fires, a result of a long, dusty spring without enough rain to wash some of the particles that settle on the poles over winter. We had that drizzling rain yesterday that causes some tracking and arcing from the conductor to the pole and smolders and then catches fire once the rain quits.

We’ve just seen a variety of outages. We’re taking active steps to replace any underground cable that has a fault that occurs. We are going to have to work on longer-term plans to resolve some of those other issues, to make sure it doesn’t happen to us again.

HPR: Is this something you expect to continue as the warm weather gets more frequent or was it a fluke that all these things happened around the same time?

MN: What I’d like to say is that it feels like a fluke but we’re not going to treat it that way. We’re going to actively look for preventive measures and continue to work on it. I would like to believe that a good heavy rain would eliminate some of the pole fires. We have been working to remove some of the cable that potentially could give us trouble, so we’ve been proactively doing that. Now we’ll review whether we can do that at a faster pace. In my mind, it is not an overall system that’s going to completely give up the ghost. We’ll focus on specific areas and go to work on that.

We have been investing over a million dollars a year locally in the state of North Dakota over the last four years. We’ve built a new transmission line to make sure there’s enough power coming into the area. That helps us in another way: it allows the power from our Minnesota operations but it also allows us to move some of North Dakota’s wind towards Minnesota.

We’ve done some major upgrades in our substation so what we’re talking about now is really the distribution systems coming out of local substations and moving out to the different parts of the city. We’re getting good help, some of the engineering department leaders are putting together a plan right now.

We are a regulated utility so we visited with our regulators. In our business, it’s what’s called a regulated monopoly. The regulators play the role of competition. They already have had one discussion -- I was out to see them. They will have us back next Wednesday where we will list the steps that we’re going to take to see if we can improve on our reliability.

HPR: I think the last time we had this discussion about the number of outages, it might have been a couple summers ago and I think you had mentioned you guys were in the process of some updates to the grid. I remember hearing the grid system was severely outdated.

MN: At that time, we maybe focused more on the transmission. We had seen a weakness with all the growth out in western North Dakota. We depended on some of the power flowing from west to east. With the load out there, it became obvious that we needed to upgrade that transmission system. So that’s real plus. The power supply is strong, substations strong. It appears now that we need to focus right at home in the neighborhoods in the areas heading out from our substations.

HPR: Moving forward, are we are going to have a weekly occurrence of one to two outages in Fargo?

MN: I sure hope not. It hasn’t been our experience in the past. I don’t think things have changed, that this will continue. I think there’s a little bit of that as we come out of the winter season. If there’s been some damage or wear or frost moving around, it exposes some of these weaknesses that in the past we’ve cleaned up in the spring and experienced pretty strong reliability through the rest of the year. I am in the position though of not being able to guarantee, but what I will say is that we are going to work hard to find the root causes, look for some of the proactive steps to take and we’re truly focused on this. It’s got our complete attention.

The fact is that we are a significant corporate entity. When we need to move on something, we have the resources to do so.