Black Hills Energy has announced a new effort to mitigate risk relating to utilities and wildfires. However, some customers are concerned that could mean blackouts.
The program is a public safety power shutoff, or PSPS program, which would take daily wind, weather and drought conditions into account during wildfire season.
Black Hills Energy vice president Wes Ashton said it reflects an effort at safety.
“Those are the sort of situations or events we’re always trying to stay ahead of as far as how do we make sure we as an electric company don’t have facilities that could cause anything to have a fire and what would cause that to spread,” Ashton said.
As seen in major California wildfires in recent memory, utilities are capable of sparking devastating, uncontrollable wildfires. Ashton said Black Hills Energy doesn’t want it to happen here.
“We can lay our map of facilities down on top of what we would identify as high-risk wildfire areas, so think rural, tree-lined areas," Ashton said. "Then, pair that with actual real weather data, not just the local forecast, it’s millions of points. We can utilize that to come up with a formula when it’s the most extreme, most volatile, most weather conditions, and then we can take proactive steps.”
With this effort comes concern from customers expecting power delivery. Ashton conceded it’s hard to quantify precisely how many could be impacted but said it’s a low number at any one time.
“The majority of our customers as you would expect are in more urban areas," Ashton said. "They’re in areas that would not be a high fire risk. What we would do is based on those weather conditions, based on our facilities, then we’d institute what would essentially be a proactive de-energization of that line, and then we would wait until conditions improve to essentially reenergize that line.”
Ultimately, a PSPS would be reserved for only the most severe fire risk days, well beyond an average red flag warning day.