Orcas Power & Light Cooperative

San Juan Island will experience a planned power outage on Friday, May 18th beginning at 11:30 p.m. and ending by 12:00 midnight. This 30-minute outage is necessary to upgrade a piece of equipment that will improve system reliability for all San Juan Island members. OPALCO members are responsible for their own equipment and OPALCO encourages… READ MORE »

All of San Juan County will experience a planned power outage beginning at 11:00 pm on Thursday, September 15th and ending by 6:00 am on Friday, September 16th. Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is conducting this outage event in their substation in Anacortes, which is the point of delivery for power in the San Juan Islands…. READ MORE »

This afternoon at approximately 2:15 pm, OPALCO linemen were performing routine maintenance in an underground vault located by the County Sheriff’s office on Mt. Baker Road when an equipment failure caused a fault and brief outage. Because the line crew was working in close proximity to the equipment failure, medical personnel were called to the… READ MORE »

All of San Juan County will experience a planned power outage beginning at 11:00 pm on Thursday, September 15th and ending by 6:00 am on Friday, September 16th. This maintenance outage is mandated by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). OPALCO crews will take advantage of this opportunity to conduct inspection and maintenance work… READ MORE »

A TEAM of linemen from Eastsound repaired an underwater cable that failed in Cascade Lake on Sunday, May 15th. Power was quickly rerouted from the Olga substation to serve those affected by the outage, which last about two hours. After surveying the situation on Sunday, the crew arrived Monday morning to tackle the problem. Steve… READ MORE »

The power went out for most of San Juan County on Monday, December 6th at 11:27 am. OPALCO engineers used their SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system to pinpoint possible faults and determined that the outage was on the BPA transmission side. While the engineering staff spoke with BPA officials, linemen on Lopez were dispatched to scout the… READ MORE »

The winds blew in gusts up to 40 mph, temperatures were in the teens and OPALCO linemen worked all through the night to track down multiple power outages and restore power across the county. The first outages of the night began at 4:00 pm when wind blew tree branches into the power lines in Olga on Orcas… READ MORE »

All of Shaw Island and most of Orcas Island (except east of Olga Artworks, Obstruction to Eagle Lake) will experience a power outage beginning at midnight on Friday, October 15th and ending by 4:00 am. The planned outage is necessary for OPALCO crews to replace an old pole with a new steel pole on a transmission line. OPALCO members… READ MORE »

At 2:15 pm on Friday, May 28th, the power went out on all of Shaw, Orcas and Crane Islands after a fault occurred on a submarine cable that runs from Shaw to Orcas. Crews had responded to an alarm on the submarine cable, which is monitored remotely through OPALCO’s automated metering infrastructure using SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data… READ MORE »