Power returns to more than 4,200 Xcel customers in Boulder, Jefferson counties

More than 4,200 Xcel customers remained without power as of 2:30 p.m. Monday in south Boulder and parts of Boulder and Jefferson counties.

Monday morning, as many as 13,844 customers were without power during an outage in the same south Boulder area that started at 10:20 a.m. and stretched south into Jefferson County, according to Xcel Energy’s outage map. That outage was caused by a substation problem, according to Xcel spokesperson Lisa Andersen.

At 1:02 p.m., the original outage was removed from the utility’s map and replaced with an outage affecting 4,213 customers in the same area, according to the utility. That outage was expected to be fixed by 3:30 p.m. Monday, according to the utility.

Earlier estimates said the outage would be fixed by 5 p.m.

The outage was also affecting the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Mesa Lab in Boulder, according to David Hosansky, an NCAR spokesperson who said the lab’s backup power also failed, and may result in a days-long lab closure.

Information about the cause of the afternoon outage and whether customers in other towns and cities were affected was unavailable.

This is a developing story and may be updated.