Xcel Energy to probe procedures in wake of power outages

DENVER, COLORADO - Xcel Energy said it will investigate possible changes in the way it buys natural gas and study other internal procedures that may have contributed to last month's power outages.

The rolling outages during a bitter cold snap February 18 left about 300,000 Colorado Xcel customers without power for periods of 30 minutes to several hours.

The company's findings were contained in a 28-page report that was sent to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Commission spokesman Terry Bote said he couldn't comment on the report.

Jim Greenwood, director of the Office of Consumer Counsel, which speaks for consumers in cases involving the power company, said he hadn't had an opportunity to read the report.

Xcel's report listed several reasons for the rolling outages: a combination of colder-than-expected weather, a temporary shortfall of natural-gas supplies and the breakdown of some generators that overtaxed the system and forced the company to shut down power in some areas.

In the report, the company said that over the next 90 days, it will:

- Investigate whether it should alter the way it buys and stores gas to provide more of a "cushion" to respond to extreme weather conditions.

- Study whether it can improve internal communications among various departments.

- Work with generation suppliers to determine the causes of independent power-plant failures. Of 18 generating units that failed during the cold spell, five were Xcel's, company spokesman Mark Stutz said.

- Investigate what technology it can use to provide more accurate information to customers who call to report outages. After the outages began, the volume of calls to Xcel call centers grew to 450 times more than expected for a Saturday morning.

"Between 8:45 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., over 250,000 callers received a busy signal from Xcel," the report said.

Among other findings were problems with a program that lets the company cut power to large business customers during emergencies.

The "interruptible" power program gives businesses a reduced electric rate in return for letting Xcel take them off-line when the drain on the system becomes too heavy.

The company was able to interrupt power delivery to some but not all of the businesses that agreed to the program, Xcel said in the report.

But even if the program had worked as designed, the company said, Xcel still would have needed to initiate controlled outages to keep the entire electric system from collapsing, Stutz said.

"It wouldn't have changed the outcome anyway, but it is obviously one of the things we need to look at," he said.