Ben Todd was one of the hundreds of thousands people who experienced outages from Xcel Energy that weekend in April. When his electricity went off on Saturday, he wasn’t sure when it would turn back on.
“There was no update, no, ‘Here's why it's off, here's where you are in a queue, here's what we're working on,’” Todd said.
Xcel customers across the Front Range experienced the state’s first planned power shutoff in April due to winds exceeding 90 miles per hour. The company wanted to prevent another Marshall Fire, which destroyed over 1,000 homes in 2021. It was caused, in part, by a broken power line and high winds.
During this more recent incident, some residents lost power due to the weather. Others were part of a planned shut down, performed manually by Xcel.
“I can't tell you how many hours I've spent on the phone and on hold with how(ever) many different representatives trying to get Xcel to tell me what actually happened,” he said.
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Todd and his wife own two businesses – Full Afterburner Calzones and Rhapsody Karaoke and Chicken Wings – which are located next to each other on Broadway in South Denver. He says they lost around $15,000-$20,000 in revenue during the entire outage. His insurance company said it wouldn’t cover the losses.
“It basically puts you like a month behind, and your rent is still due and people's kids still need diapers and food,” he said. “I lost a small five digit number. Other places lost big five digit numbers, and Xcel just gets to go, ‘Oops, sorry?’ I would like to know who is holding them accountable.”
His power came back on Monday afternoon. Within hours, he said they received their first – and only – text from Xcel, asking for feedback on how the company communicated about the outage.
“So strange that they were really on top of that, but not on top of the communication about the schedule for what was going on, what they intended to do,” he said. “The text is all we got…so we were happy to fill that out and be like, ‘Terrible.’”
Bettina Swigger
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Downtown Boulder Partnership
Residents are frustrated. Customers say they received sporadic communication or none at all. They’ve vented in public meetings with the utility. Hundreds sent in comments online to state commissioners.
“A lot of people were really panicking trying to figure out what was happening,” said Bettina Swigger, the CEO of the Downtown Boulder Partnership.
Business owners are angry over lost revenue. A survey of more than 100 businesses conducted by the Downtown Boulder Partnership showed around $1.3 million in revenue loss, $250,000 in unpaid wages and up to $145,000 in product loss.
“This could have been a lot worse. However, there was a real impact,” Swigger said. “I believe that they made the right decision (but) I still struggled to understand why they weren't able to give more advanced notice.”
These weren’t the only parties involved. A wastewater facility was close to leaking raw sewage into a nearby creek. Residents using important medical devices were scrambling to find back-up power.
“There is no room for error,” said Lori Peek, the director of the Natural Hazards Center at CU Boulder. “Emergency communications really are a matter of life and death.”
Peek said no matter the hazard, good emergency communication must be timely and clear.
“The (messages) obviously didn't come soon enough for people to be able to understand what was going to happen in the ramifications of that for their business, for their home, for their school,” she said.
These messages also must be tailored to its audience, from the jargon-filled emails to the complicated maps. This is especially important for vulnerable communities, Peek said.
“There is a chance to make those messages even more tailored to say, ‘if you are a person who is dependent on a powered medical device, this is where you need to go,’” she said. “Or ‘this is where you can get help.’”
Xcel did get some aspects of communication right, Peek said. People were directed to live humans on the phone instead of a robot. But she added that the communication also needs to come from trusted messengers. For some, Xcel is not that trustworthy.
“It's still coming from a power company, right, rather than your local elected official, or religious leader, or community leader,” she said.
But communication during a disaster is complex. Xcel’s customers speak a variety of different languages and use different devices for alerts.
“That's no small task to do during non disaster times, let alone during urgent times,” she said. “It’s never going to be easy.”
Xcel Energy Colorado
Some have suggested moving toward a statewide weather alert system, but Peek believes it will not be effective. The Natural Hazards Center found last year that less than 40% of Coloradans have signed up for state emergency alerts.
“The thought that we could just kind of blast out this message to people who again may or may not have cell phones may or may not have signed up for the emergency alerts, unfortunately, that alone is not the answer to this,” she said.
Fundamentally changing how Xcel manages the fire risk of power lines on very windy days would be difficult. Undergrounding lines can be five to ten times the cost of a normal line, adding up to around $10-$20 million dollars per mile.
“Those costs ultimately get passed down to our consumer bills, so we have to make a trade off here,” said Kyri Baker, a professor in the department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural at the CU Boulder. “Would we be willing to pay more expensive bills and underground everything? Is there a sweet spot where we underground the high risk areas? There's a lot of trade-offs here that aren't just, you know, Xcel being the bad guy.”
Restructuring the grid is a big infrastructure hassle. While it could help Xcel granularly control areas of higher danger, it takes a lot more sensing technology and it would require many hours of labor to fix.
“It's not easy to just turn off individual homes and sort of make it you know, ‘Oh, these 27 homes are in the impacted region,’” Baker said. “Xcel (is) flipping a switch upstream, that just turns off power to an entire huge area without being necessary.”
Xcel and other utilities have been sued in the past for power line damage that resulted in wildfires. Bri-Mathias Hodge, who works with Baker at CU Boulder, believes Xcel couldn’t do much else in the moment.
"For them to take this action that just shows you how large they perceive the risk to be to actually do this action,” he said. “It's really against everything that the utility stands for to do this.”
What Xcel can do in the short-term is improve how it communicates about outages.
“We've been very candid, where we know we have opportunities to improve,” said Robert Kenney, the president of Xcel Energy Colorado. “We knew it right after it happened.”
Tony Webster
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Wikimedia Commons
Following the incident, it reached out to customers in May to update their emergency contact information and power needs, including customers who use plug-in medical devices.
“We only know if a customer's on durable medical equipment if they tell us,” Kenney said.
Xcel says it did reach out to customers Friday night and Saturday morning, but the company said it wants to communicate earlier in the future. Kenney said Xcel plans to compile a list of critical facilities and it plans to start updating customers three days in advance about any potential for a planned shutoff.
“At a 72-hour mark, a 48-hour mark, a 24-hour mark, we would provide regular updates of what we're seeing,” Kenney said. “As you can imagine, weather’s dynamic. What you're seeing at 24 hours is going to be very different than what you saw at 72 hours.”
Xcel is also looking to other utility companies for insights on how to do this better. Pacific Gas and Electric, based in California, has done planned shutoffs before. Their team sends out a first watch notification to customers up to two days before the power is shut off and send out extra alerts to those who use medical devices that require power.
Kenney knows there’s more that has to be done – he has heard that loud and clear. But he said this was the only real option.
“This was not arbitrary, this wasn't random,” he said. “We did this to protect the public…it's impossible to prove a negative, but based upon the evidence that we've seen afterward, we can reasonably and logically conclude that we averted a fire from happening by virtue of taking this extra measure.”
The Colorado Public Utilities Commission is currently investigating Xcel’s communication during the outage. The company is answering questions from commissioners and will issue new disaster communication rules next month.
