SWEPCO & Southwest Power Pool address recent emergency grid protection outage

SHREVEPORT, La. (KSLA) — A new conference was held Tuesday, April 29 at Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell’s office in Shreveport after an emergency grid protection outage on April 26 left around 30,000 people in Bossier and Caddo parishes with no power for hours.

The president and CEO of Southwest Power Pool (SPP), Lenny Nickel, was in attendance, as was SWEPCO President Brett Mattison. Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell sat between the two.

Campbell began the news conference by recapping that situation on April 26. More than 30,000 people lost power on Saturday, April 26. Louisiana was the only state in SPP’s 14-state region that was affected. Campbell said he believes people who were financially impacted should be compensated in some way by SPP and SWEPCO. He invited Nickel and Mattison to an upcoming Public Service Commission meeting on May 19 in Lafayette so they can explain what happened, and what they plan to do to prevent it from happening in the future.

Nickel says SPP is a nonprofit organization and is tasked with ensuring grid reliability for an area that includes portions of 14 states.

“I deeply regret the electricity outage on April 26 that affected tens of thousands of people,” he said.

He says his organization has been managing the power grid for more than 80 years, and that something like this is usually a rare event. However, it has happened twice in April in nearly the same area, once on April 2 and once on April 26. Nickel says the conditions that caused each event are different. The April 2 event was caused by storm damage outside of Louisiana, while this past weekend’s event was caused by a higher than expected demand for electricity and not enough power generation and transmission facilities online in the area, Nickel says.

He mentioned several times during the news conference a report on their website entitled “Our Generational Challenge.” He says it outlines the issues they’re facing in creating enough power generation. The report can be read here.

Some of those facilities were down for maintenance, Nickel explained. He says those maintenance requests were approved months ago when their forecasts called for lesser demand on the system and lower temperatures. Essentially, they were expecting rain in the area that would’ve made temperatures cooler, but that rain wound up going farther north. Despite this, Nickel says SPP takes full responsibility for the situation.

Mattison says SWEPCO is 100% focused on the customers in every decision they make. He says they were able to do something called “rolling load shed” on Saturday, meaning they shifted where the power was out and for how long so not everyone was down for quite as long. It was a last resort, he says, but if they hadn’t done it, the outage might’ve affected 300,000 people rather than 30,000… and might’ve lasted much longer.

On Saturday, SPP directed SWEPCO to interrupt around 140 megawatts of load, which equated to around 30,000 people. SWEPCO carried out this directive, deciding where to cut power. When asked why the brunt of the outages were seen in Bossier Parish, Mattison said it was because that was where they saw the most issues with low voltage.

Commissioner Campbell questioned why power wasn’t cut in other states in SPP’s territory. Nickel said it’s because it was a “local area problem,” meaning the only way to relieve the situation was to cut power in the area with the problem. Cutting power in other states would’ve provided no relief, he says. Campbell followed that with a question about why SWEPCO had low voltage to begin with. Mattison says there was not enough power generation because of the facilities that were down for maintenance. He says those maintenance projects are usually done in the spring and fall when power consumption is expected to be lower due to milder temperatures. That wasn’t the case Saturday. The high temperature in Shreveport Saturday was 89°.

WATCH THE FULL NEWS CONFERENCE HERE:

Nickel says they can’t guarantee this won’t happen again, but he says they will be doing an in depth analysis of what happened and produce a “lessons learned” report with recommendations for the future. That report will be made public, he says. He expects it will take a month or two to finish. Nickel went on to say the issue of a lack of power generation is a nationwide problem and is becoming worse.

Mattison was asked why people weren’t alerted ahead of time about the outage. Nickel said it was because they didn’t see the issue coming quick enough to give advance warning. He says they didn’t realize the voltage situation was as bad as it was.

One of the main concerns brought up at the news conference was what’s going to happen in the summer when temperatures are even hotter. Nickel said they’re going to have to take a more conservative approach and sure enough reserve power generation is available so it can be drawn on when needed. He says maintenance outages will have to be restricted. He says they’ll be working with SWEPCO to strike the right balance on this.

Furthermore, Nickel says in these situations, consumers can help by reducing their power consumption in the event advance warning is given. Saturday’s situation was different though because of how little warning was provided to customers.

Nickel says the generators that are offline now (and were offline on April 2 and 26) are expected to be back online in the next week or two, which he says will help prevent this sort of situation in the summer.

Nickel was asked about a recent report stating SPP’s region is as risk of not having enough supply. He says in 2022, the board of directors imposed a requirement on all utilities to increase the amount of excess generation they have to carry to mitigate those summer risks. He says the challenge though is that it takes around five years to get new generators built, and that utility companies are responsible for that.

Nickel says if all generators are back online as expected, things should be fine this summer because they have excess generation ready, however, extreme weather or a prolonged heat dome could change that.

Mattison talked about how some plants being taken offline recently has also put more strain on things. He says utility companies need more generation across the country.

Campbell discusses his support for solar and wind energy too. A 1,000-acre solar farm was recently opened in north Caddo Parish.

SWEPCO also noted they already get wind power from nearby Oklahoma too. Mattison noted that SWEPCO wants to have diversified sources of energy. He says they’re wanting to build nuclear infrastructure too.

“It’s coming, but it’s a long-term solution,” Mattison said.

Nickel noted in his 33-year career in the industry, he’s never seen things change as quickly as in the last couple of years. He says load growth is increasing around 5% per year, and loss of load was 30 times higher in 2023 as compared to 2017. He says nobody can keep up with demand when it takes five years to build a generator.

SWEPCO says some plants have been retired in recent years too because it was more cost effective to take them offline rather than to bring them into environmental compliance. However, new plants are on the horizon. One is set to open around the end of 2027, Mattison says.

Campbell reiterated that he expects Nickel and Mattison to find a way to compensate customers who lost money due to the outages. Many local business owners, particularly restaurant owners, voiced complaints on social media about losing revenue Saturday because of the outage.

Mattison said if during the summer the area sees 60+ days of temps over 100°, conservation warnings will be put out. He says the grid takes on a tremendous load when it’s that hot. He can’t guarantee an outage won’t happen again under those conditions.

Nickel says the good news though is that they’re always improving things. He said this February, they served 10% more load with no issues as compared to February of 2021, when a severe winter storm crippled power grids in the south.

Some concerns were also raised about new data centers coming to north Louisiana that require tremendous amounts of power. Campbell says data centers will not be prioritized over people. These data centers, which are asking for around 700 megawatts of power, will be paying to build their own power generation, Mattison says. He referenced in particular a new Meta data center in the Ruston area.

SWEPCO encourages customers to make sure they sign up for alerts and emails, and that they update their account info to include their phone number. Mattison says they can’t reach out if they don’t have customers’ contact info. SWEPCO posted a number of updates on their social media too, so customers are encouraged to follow them for updates.

Nickel noted it’s also taking longer to build new generators because of supply chain issues. He says they know the area needs more transmission lines, but customers don’t like them because they aren’t pretty to look at. He also says building transmission lines takes even longer than building new generators.

Campbell concluded the news conference by saying he doesn’t work for either SWEPCO or SPP, but that he “grades their papers.” He says they both get an “F” for Saturday, and that he expects them to make improvements. If not, he says, “We can fine the hell out of them.”

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