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Doug Bechtel
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Even though we are near the end of our winter storm season, I would like to discuss some of the major outages we have had this winter.
We have talked about the problems with the trees on the mainland before. We have put a lot of effort into getting the trees in Anacortes trimmed back without a lot of success. Even with our lack of success we did not have any outages in this area this winter.
BPA has a contract with Puget Power to use their transmission lines to deliver power to us. BPA is renegotiating that contract to pay Puget a bonus if the reliability of power to us exceeds some standard and a financial penalty if it does not meet the standard. The desire to make a profit may give Puget Power an extra incentive to keep our lights on.
Regardless of other efforts, it seems that growth and development are accomplishing what we have not been able to accomplish - the removal of the trees from along this route. There is not much question in my mind that we will see some outages in this area in the future but I also think that the worst is behind us.
Even though there have not been any major outages caused by problems on the mainland, BPA has had a pretty hard winter serving OPALCO. Back in November, Decatur, Blakely and the east side of Orcas Island had a lengthy outage when one of the three submarine cables from the mainland failed. The problem was temporarily solved when the cable serving Shaw and the west side of Orcas was also used to provide power to the area served by the failed cable. We now have two submarine cables from the mainland serving us. Right now either of the two cables could meet all of our needs but our loads will soon exceed the capacity of the smaller of these two cables. We are actively working with BPA for a permanent solution to this problem.
Over the past few months we have had two outages when trees fell into the transmission lines causing widespread outages. One was on the north part of Orcas Island and one was near the gravel pit on San Juan Island. Both took us some time to locate but were more easily repaired.
The most recent major outage affected Lopez and San Juan Islands and appears to have been caused by the failure of some electronic equipment in the BPA substation on Lopez. I'm not convinced that this piece of equipment caused the outage. There is no doubt that the piece of equipment failed but Puget Power had an outage near the submarine cable terminal at Fidalgo at the exact same instant. In addition to the BPA equipment that failed, we had failures to our electronic equipment in the BPA substation and our substation on Lopez. A little too much of a coincidence for me.
All in all it has not been too bad a winter for us. Before you call, I have not forgotten about all of you who have suffered from outages. We continue to work to minimize outages. We have made great strides but we are not finished by a long shot.
Doug Bechtel
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