Chugach outage knocks out power for 8,500 MEA customers

PALMER — Matanuska Electric Association customers were left in the dark for about an hour and a half, Jan. 26 after a failure at the new Southcentral Power Plant in Anchorage triggered power outages throughout the Railbelt system.

MEA spokesperson Julie Estey said the power tripped to about 8,500 member owners in the Knik-Goose Bay/Fairview and Chugiak/Eagle River/Birchwood areas around 10:29 p.m., Monday and was restored to all customers by midnight.

“Load was a lot higher than generation,” Estey said of the root of the problem.

About 6,500 members Chugach Electric ratepayers also lost power when the 180 MW engine failed at the new power plant owned jointly by Chugach Electric Association and Municipal Light and Power, according to Chugach spokesperson Sarah Wiggers.

When demand outstrips supply, Estey said there are protocols in place among Railbelt utilities for mandatory load share. MEA’s portion is 20 percent of its load.

Had the outage persisted, Estey said plans call for rolling the outage across the service area.

That means power would have been restored to some neighborhoods and turned off in new areas to meet the 20 percent load shed requirement.

To replace the lost power, Golden Valley Electric Association and Municipal Light and Power ramped up generators to add power back into the grid and were able to prevent load shedding in their service areas, Estey said.

In the end, additional generation units at the Beluga Power Plant were brought online around midnight to replace the system, she said.

Generating additional power from MEA’s new Eklutna power plant wasn’t an option, Estey said. She said until the plant is fully tested and commissioned, MEA is not allowed to operate it without

Wartsila staff present. Wartsila is the Finnish manufacturer of the engines that will generate power at the new Eklutna Generation Station once MEA flips the switch later this year.

But until the new Eklutna power plant is completed, Estey said MEA didn’t have the option to boost generation instead of shed users.

“When we have our own generation going, we can ramp up and pick up our own load,” she said by phone from Juneau.

Chugach Electric says a transformer protecting one of the generators at the new power plant tripped, taking the engine offline.

Estey said part of the incident review will consider how one engine tripping could have so much impact across the Railbelt transmission system.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.