On a sunny, temperate October day with a light breeze, it’s as far from a power-outage emergency as a utility dispatcher could hope for.
Yet the distinctive, high-pitched, electronic cowbell alarm rings every 60 to 90 seconds in Xcel Energy’s Denver distribution center.
The alarm signifies a glitch – an outage or circuit disruption lasting as little as a millisecond – in Xcel’s 26,000 miles of distribution power lines or 68 metro-Denver substations.
From February’s massive outages to routine maintenance jobs that most customers will never see, the pulse of Xcel’s electric and natural- gas system is monitored and controlled from a nondescript building in central Denver.
The control center is a focus of Xcel’s $347.5 million annual spending on operations and maintenance, including a special three-year appropriation of $54 million to address recurring outages that have brought regulatory scrutiny and customer dissatisfaction to the utility.
The center handles about 100,000 incidents a year. They range from outage calls reported by customers to gas- or electric-service disruptions detected by monitoring equipment to planned maintenance and repair by Xcel technicians.
The cowbell alarm rings, and a technician checks a monitor to detect the origin of the disruption. It turns out to be a momentary circuit switch during planned maintenance at the South Substation in southwest Denver.
A few moments later, it rings again. Tree branches have fallen on a power line, causing a localized outage.
Natural-gas dispatcher Guy Forti pauses between alarm rings to assess the day’s activity.
“Today, we’re very busy with gas leaks and broken gas mains,” he says. “The weather is getting cooler, people are turning on their heat systems, and we’re getting a lot of calls.”
Forti appreciates Xcel’s public-awareness campaign to have customers report all potential leaks when they smell the rotten-egg odor of mercaptan, the chemical used to infuse odorless natural gas with a distinctive scent.
But the ad campaign adds to the control center’s call volume.
“We can always tell when the commercials are running,” Forti says with a wry smile.
In a conference room a few steps away from the control center, Xcel executives and managers huddled on the weekend of Feb. 18 when subzero weather caused a series of events that left 371,370 Colorado customers without electricity.
After Xcel’s internal review of the outages and a Public Utilities Commission investigation, Xcel adopted a series of measures designed to improve internal controls and communicate problems better with customers.
In addition to improving customers’ ability to get outage reports from Xcel call centers, the utility is exploring ways to disseminate information over the Internet, if security and access concerns can be addressed.
Many of the service initiatives stem from improving communications between staffers at the Denver control center and executives at other Xcel facilities, who in turn can relay the information to customers.
“We didn’t do a good job of communicating with customers (during the February outages),” said Pat Vincent, president and chief executive of Xcel’s Public Service Co. of Colorado.
During outages, Vincent said, “customers need to know if they should just go to the movies or go spend the night at their relatives’.”
Staff writer Steve Raabe can be reached at 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com.
