LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Thousands of Nebraskans woke up this morning without power, requiring LES and NPPD to perform rotating power cuts. It’s because the central US is going through extreme cold and many states are struggling to meet the requirements.
The outages took place in the city and in Nebraska between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m.
Rick Batten, a resident of Denton, was one of the victims. He was hit by not one, but two rollout failures that were just 15 minutes apart.
“Our house has dropped to 60 degrees,” said Batten. “Me and my wife were sitting by the fire and I managed to make some coffee, so we had coffee and each read the news and that’s how we spent our morning.”
He’s not alone. 44,000 LES customers and an unknown number of NPPD customers were without power for 30-60 minutes. The companies said they had no control over the decision.
“We don’t know yet why this happened, but what we knew was that we were legally obliged to do it and if we didn’t, we would be penalized,” said Kevin Wailes, CEO of LES.
The call was made by the Southwest Power Pool, which is tasked with maintaining grid reliability in most of the central US, including Nebraska.
“We were all producing more power than we were using,” said Wailes. “But the rest of the footprint had problems related to fuel and cold weather.”
Tom Kent, CEO and President of NPPD said if action had not been taken there would have been widespread uncontrolled outage.
Both NPPD and LES said they were working to make sure customers were alerted as much as possible, but since it was an emergency, they could only do so much.
“This was an unusual cold snap,” said Kent. “I know everyone would have loved to know when it was going to happen at their house, I know my wife wanted to know when it was going to happen at our house, but there’s no way to know.”
Both Kent and Wailes said the companies were working to keep the power going in places like hospitals, prisons and emergency centers. They have also said they are optimistic that there will be no further interruptions, but there are no guarantees.
As for how this could affect LES bills, Wailes said that as customers use more power to heat their homes, their bills will rise, but he said LES cannot raise rates without a vote from the LES board. and the Lincoln City Council.
Customers like Batten said that while it is tricky to have a power outage, a minor outage, like he’s experienced, is better than what’s happening in Texas where he has a number of loved ones.
“They’ve been without power for 36 hours and their house is 40 degrees,” said Batten. “So I think all we can do to cut back and share power is what everyone should be doing.”
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