Liberty Energy crews work non-stop to restore power

Wind gusts that reached up to 150 mph last weekend knocked over power poles and toppled trees onto live electrical wires throught the Liberty Energy territory in Northern California.

“Basically, crews have been working non-stop since the first storm arrived on Friday,” according to Mike Smart, Liberty Utilities-CA President. “For the past four days, we’ve reset poles, restrung wire and even made repairs to another utility’s infrastructure because it affected our ability to serve our customers.”

Approximately 16,400 Liberty customers were affected by some type of power outage. All outages were storm-related, with some of them resulting from upstream problems impacting the delivery of Liberty’s energy supply.

“Just like us, NV Energy was having weather-related problems with their infrastructure. Since we buy nearly all our energy from them through a negotiated purchase power agreement, their infrastructure issues affect Liberty,” Smart added. “It was in our customers’ best interest to make repairs along their lines while they were dealing with so many other outage issues.”

While it is not common practice for utilities to make repairs to each other’s infrastructure, it can be done in emergency situations. Accounting and billing is done afterwards to ensure one utility’s customer base is not responsible for the other utility’s expenses.

North Lake Tahoe Damage

In the northern region along Lake Tahoe, strong winds caused multiple issues, mostly tree related. This affected the west shore region of Tahoe City, the Truckee River corridor, and Glenshire as well as Plumas and Sierra County communities of Portola, Loyalton, Hobart Mills, Russell Valley and Sierra Brooks.

Two transmission lines serving that area went down but, fortunately, they occurred at separate times. The 609 power line which runs from the Truckee Substation near the Town of Truckee to the Squaw Valley Substation along Hwy 89 was restored on Sunday morning. The 132 power line which runs parallel and to the east of the 609 power line went down on Sunday evening and wasn’t restored until Tuesday morning. These two transmission lines form a loop with the 625/629/650 transmission power line which runs from the Truckee Substation to the Kings Beach Substation along Hwy 267 and connect back to Squaw Valley via Tahoe City.

“We were very lucky that these two events didn’t occur at the same time,” North Shore Operations Manager Blaine Ladd said. “If they had, we would have asked customers served by those lines to curtail their energy use and/or had rolling outages to avoid an overload on the 650 power line.”

Diesel generators located at the Kings Beach Substation were used for contingency during loss of the two lines, but Ladd noted that there are usage limitations on these emergency-use generators because of environmental impact as well as higher operating costs. While the amount of diesel fuel used during this latest storm is not yet known, Liberty did have to burn 35,000 gallons of diesel fuel between December 24, 2014 and January 3, 2015 to meet higher winter demand.

“Loss of the two power lines and the potential result of overloading the 650 transmission line if their failure had overlapped really highlights the need to upgrade the 650 power line,” Ladd added. Plans to upgrade the aging 650 and 625 transmission lines are currently in the permitting process, and Liberty hopes to begin construction on Phase I of the project this year. It is anticipated that the entire upgrade will take six or more years to be completed.

South Lake Tahoe Damage

According to Liberty’s South Shore Operations Manager Randy Kelly, the hardest hit area was in the Coleville/Walker region in Mono County, again due to strong winds. Liberty’s crews replaced nine downed power poles in that area. Other repairs were made to poles that had wires downed and/or cross-arms on the poles broken by toppled trees.

“Around South Lake Tahoe itself, we had three broken poles and six spans of electrical wire down due to trees falling, mostly in the Camp Richardson area. There were other smaller outages around town that we were able to address quickly.”

“We really appreciate our customers’ patience during these past four days as we’ve done our best to recover from storm-related damage,” Smart noted. “Let’s hope that the next storm dumps more snow with less wind.”