North Dakota and other states face rolling blackouts

from Insider.com – A major power-grid manager that operates in states from North Dakota to Texas has ordered rolling blackouts amid an extreme cold blast that has hit much of the US.

Southwest Power Pool, which is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, ordered the rolling blackouts Monday, declaring an energy emergency. Extreme weather had already taken out power for millions of homes in Texas, where temperatures hit record lows.

Tuesday morning, rolling blackouts hit Valley City, ND residents.   For now the blackouts could last 30 to 60 minutes.   Valley City Public Works said it is likely to have more,  with little notice.   Other cities in ND are reporting short black-outs.

(Facebook)  Northern Plains Electric Cooperative (NPEC) experienced several substation outages throughout the service territory this morning (Feb. 16th) 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.

According to The New York Times, the organization manages the electric grid used in all of Oklahoma and Kansas and parts of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and New Mexico.

The grid operator said in a statement on Twitter that this was the first time it had ordered mass rolling blackouts and that it was doing so to prevent further uncontrolled power failures.