(Facebook)  Northern Plains Electric Co-op experienced several substation outages throughout the service territory Feb 16 due to required load shedding from one of our power suppliers.

The regional transmission operator Southwest Power Pool (SPP) (spp.org) issued an emergency request to our Power Supplier, Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), to start shedding load. The request from SPP was due to extreme temperatures throughout the central region of the nation which has caused a strain on the region’s electrical system. This request resulted in the deliberate shutdown of electric power at NPEC substations across our service territory to mitigate further strain of the electrical system. Members experienced outages that lasted between 45 to 60 minutes.

It is possible that the rolling outages may continue tonight (Feb. 16th) and tomorrow (Feb. 17th) morning. If this does occur, we expect similar outage durations of 45 to 60 minutes.

SPP operates the electrical transmission system across parts of 14 states, including North Dakota. SPP works with power suppliers to implement emergency outages if they reach a critical energy supply level. NPEC has no control over which service areas have power interrupted, nor do we know precisely when it will occur.

NPEC will provide further updates when more information becomes available.