Portland General Electric CEO Maria Pope expressed regret last week over a breakdown in public communications as a series of ice storms swept through Oregon in February, leaving nearly half the utility’s customers without power.

About 421,000 of PGE’s customers lost power at some point during the storms and their aftermath, peaking at 325,000 simultaneous outages on Feb. 15.

By the end of the month, line workers from PGE and utilities throughout the West performed more than 759,000 restorations in the company’s service territory.

If the numbers don’t add up, that’s because some households and businesses lost power more than once as successive waves of freezing rain and snow snapped branches and toppled entire trees and power poles. The ensuing melt further destabilized many of the region’s towering trees, sparking more outages even after the storms had passed.

“That happened in the rural areas but also in Portland itself, where additional damage could take out customers for a second, third, fourth [time]. Some customers had up to six outages,” Pope told the Oregon Public Utility Commission during a special meeting March 30 to discuss the storm response by the state’s electric and telecommunications utilities.

While the storms left hundreds of thousands of PGE customers without power, the utility’s outage information system left those customers in the dark for days regarding restoration status. Customers calling into PGE or checking in via the company’s web site repeatedly encountered messages saying that the utility could provide no time estimates for restoring service to their homes.

Larry Bekkedahl, PGE vice president of grid architecture, integration and system operations, told the commission that the company deployed staff in the field ahead of line crews to assess the location and size of problems and estimate repair times.

“I would say in our line centers, we did a great job monitoring where those crews were and assigning them to high-priority areas and having them out there and looking and doing the work,” Bekkedahl said. The challenge was in conveying that information to PGE’s call center and website. “That’s where we had the failing.”

PUC Chair Megan Decker asked PGE’s executive to clarify whether they felt the company had the right information but just needed to plug that into its customer facing platforms.

“Our systems operated as they were designed, but they were not designed for this magnitude of number of outages, down to the granular level of each household through our customer service system,” Pope said.

“While overall restorations went well, we know that the customer information that we were able to share during the storm was inadequate, and we struggled with communicating specific customer restoration and other information, and we are working to do better,” she said.

Unique Event

Pope said that “while it’s not an excuse,” February’s event wrought 10 times more damage than the Labor Day wildfires that ravaged Western Oregon last summer. (See PacifiCorp Faces Class Action over Wildfire Response.)

“This storm was unique. The duration, winds, multiple freeze and thaw cycles and ice floodings were especially damaging,” Pope said. “We operate in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, perhaps the densest forest and urban tree canopy in the United States.”

Bekkedahl also pointed to the historic nature of the winter storms, “the likes of which we have not seen since the 1962 Columbus Day Storm,” a locally storied event that left more than a million Oregonians without power.

During the February event, PGE lost 401 miles of transmission and 20 substations and saw the downing of 12,733 distribution lines. In the end, crews replaced over 1.2 million feet of wire, 1,165 poles, 1,110 transformers and 16,939 insulators in addition to restoring power to the substations — a necessary step before much of the other restoration work could occur.

“Recovery of this magnitude could not have occurred without mutual assistance [from other utilities] and contractors,” Pope said. She noted that PGE relied on three times the normal staffing level to perform the work, greater than any other time in company history.

Spokesperson Steve Corson told RTO Insider that PGE has not released cost estimates for the repairs.

“PGE has filed a request with the OPUC for use of deferred accounting to track the costs of the storm for future consideration in customer prices but has not yet addressed this deferral request with the commission,” Corson said.

During the PUC meeting, Pope said she thought it was “also important to acknowledge what didn’t happen” as a result of the storms.

“We had no generator outages. In the extreme cold, our plants operated well, in distinct contrast to Texas during the same period of time. Nevertheless, we remain focused on ensuring that enough resources are available at all times, including the coldest and hottest days of the year,” she said.

Pope said the winter storms highlighted the importance of the company’s work in helping to develop regional resource adequacy programs. She also called it a “stark reminder” of the effects of climate change and “the obligation that we all share to take bold action.”

Heart of Resilience

Bekkedahl said PGE will use its restoration review process to identify measures that improve grid reliability, including revised system planning criteria, use of storm hardening equipment, improved ice loading capabilities and a review of vegetation management practices both in and outside the utility right-of-way.

“We will look to increasing the resiliency of the grid, considering ice storms, wildfires, earthquakes and other catastrophic events. All the while, we will also ensure building the grid of the future, thinking ahead, recognizing that we need to utilize every customer dollar efficiently,” Bekkedahl said.

He said PGE’s specific near-term actions will include:

• reviewing restoration priorities with a focus on critical service customers;
• improving the company’s outage map and operational processes to provide better restoration information to customers; and
• providing a hardened transmission line to each of the critical substations that were de-energized.

“Obviously this was an event that overwhelmed your system. Why did it overwhelm your system?” Decker asked. She wondered aloud whether industry standards are designed to respond to a one-in-40- or one-in-10-year event. “Should we be thinking about whether industry standards are good enough?”

“When we think about resiliency, this is at the heart,” Bekkedahl responded. “If we design today for half-inch ice in the foothills of the Cascades and quarter-inch ice in the rest of the [Willamette Valley], and we got an inch of ice or two inches of ice, obviously those systems weren’t designed for that inch or two inches of ice.”

Bekkedahl noted that the standard for trimming along a transmission facility might be 15 feet, “but these trees were coming completely over or they’re bending over to a magnitude that you’d never think of as a normal standard. So how do we then harden, and should we do that for one-in-40-year events?”

“We’re reacting now and saying, ‘Let’s think differently. Let’s really harden for multiple purposes in some of these locations,” he said.