Local power utilities want plans to prevent future large-scale outages

Total estimates from yesterday’s power outage show that over 120,000 people were without power after a capacitor failed at the Goshen substation just south of Shelly. The size and the scale of the outage complicated the process of restoring power. Many people were without power for several hours as crews restored electricity in increments.

While the scale of the outage is unusual, it’s not entirely unique in eastern Idaho. The December 2014 power outage was similar in size, and was also caused by problems at the Goshen station.

“A typical network is put together so that electricity is transmitted to transmission substations and then stepped down through a series of distribution substations to serve customers,” said Margaret Oler, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Power. She then explained how the Goshen station is one of those primary substations in distributing electricity to customers in eastern Idaho.

Jackie Flowers, the managing director for Idaho Falls Power, says the Goshen station is the electrical equivalent of a traffic choke-point. “You think of it like a road for electrons,” said Flowers. “If that was the only road that was available, and you had an accident or a landslide, that road is shutdown. The electrons are the same way. To them, the transmission lines and the substation is their superhighway. If you have a component go down, sometimes you don’t have enough ability to reroute it.”

Rocky Mountain Power and its parent company Pacific Corp. are in charge of the Goshen substation. They say they put a lot of time and money into maintaining that key facility. “The maintenance work and the upgrade work is all designed to hopefully avoid problems in the future. But there’s still the fact that from time-to-time, equipment can fail,” said Oler.

Utility companies affected by the power outage say that while good maintenance is important, it still doesn’t solve the problem of the electronic choke-point seen at Goshen. Some managing directors from different electrical utilities in eastern Idaho want Pacific Corp. to create an alternate route for electrical flow.

“We want to determine what can be done at Goshen to manage that facility in a better way, or to create redundancy. So that the system, if there is a failure like what has been happening, that there is some backup route,” said Ted Austin, a spokesperson for Fall River Electric Coop.

Austin said Fall River’s general manager is planning on meeting with other representatives of other utilities to come up with a future plan. “We want it so that outages on this scale are reduced in frequency or are completely done away with,” said Austin. “We’re also going to be asking the federal energy regulatory commission FERC, to investigate this particular outage. This is not something that anyone wants to have happen, especially us.”

Rocky Mountain Power did not specifically say if they have any immediate plans to create an alternative route for electrical flow around the Goshen substation. In response to the question, Oler said, “Rocky Mountain Power does have a very robust maintenance and upgrading program to take care of all of our equipment.”