Leaders of the two power entities responsible for Saturday’s unanticipated, unannounced six-hour outage leaving 32,000 local SWEPCO customers in the dark had apologies and explanations Tuesday morning, but gave no indications of willingness to offset financial losses by local businesses or compensate for hassles created for other customers.
Local Public Service Commission member Foster Campbell convened a press conference at his Bossier City office attended by both CEOs and made it clear he wants to see some form of rebate to those “people who lost money” because they were impacted in Caddo, Bossier and Webster parishes.
That perspective was not embraced by SWEPCO CEO/President Brett Mattison, who said he didn’t see how SWEPCO could make good for electricity that wasn’t consumed – regardless of it being unavailable to customers counting on reliable service.
“We believe in people paying for damage in our state,” Campbell said. “You have a problem.”
He pledged to raise the topic again when the full five-member PSC convenes May 19.
“We will discuss the outage further at our monthly PSC meeting in Lafayette,” said Campbell, a former state legislator who has served on the commission since 2003.
Lanny Nickell, CEO/President of the Southwest Power Pool, acknowledged mistakes by his 14-state entity that manages energy distribution.
“We own the part that we played in the outages,” he said. “We take full accountability for the actions we took and understand your frustration.”
SPP relied on weather forecasts that didn’t account for warmer-than-expected temperatures, leading to higher electricity needs exacerbated by repair work scheduled and underway that reduced capacity to serve the local area. Nickell and Mattison explained SPP determined potential for a massive system crash and directed SWEPCO to stop service to portions of some higher-population areas to avert the risk of widespread “catastrophic” problems.
“This is a last resort that we ever do,” said Mattison. “But had we not done this, those 32,000 customers could have been 300,000. The transmission system can start cascading, shutting itself and generators down. It could’ve taken a long time to get the system back up.”
While expressing confidence that the immediate risk has been resolved by the managed outage, and stating they expect SWEPCO to be able to meet the area’s power needs this summer, neither CEO would rule out the potential that similar measures might be necessary later.
“Y’all got an F, we got an F, y’all got an F,” said Campbell, flanked by the two CEOs, “People were without electricity for whatever reason.”