Outage demonstrates fragility of electric grid

PALMER — For Valley residents, it was just a half hour or more with the lights off. But for the people in charge of maintaining it, a major outage last week was further proof of just how fragile the power system is in Mat-Su.

The outage just before 5 p.m. April 17 darkened the Matanuska Electric Association’s coverage area in all but Chugiak and Eagle River. Customers from Glacier View to Talkeetna were without power.

“We have a single line that comes across from the Eklutna hydro(electric) facility around to the Palmer substation that’s just down the road behind the junior high school there,” said MEA general manager Joe Griffith. “A fellow was clearing a site down there and pushing trees down with a cat (bulldozer) and probably pushed the tree into the line.”

Whether they were pushed or they just fell, a tree wound up on the line, which bounced into another line, knocking off one substation and then another.

“And strangely enough, a minute or so later, the breaker at (the) Teeland (substation) opened up and that simply islanded us at that point,” Griffith said. “The only thing we had being fed then was Eagle River, Birchwood and Chugiak.”

Power was soon back on. But, Griffith said, if the company had the big lines it is in the process of stringing across the Palmer Hayflats energized, it never would have gone off in the first place.

“What we suffered from was a weak non-robust transmission system that bit us in the rear when one little event happened,” Griffith said.

Those newer, bigger lines are replacing, in Griffith’s words, “ancient” 50-year-old lines that were never meant to handle the capacity MEA runs them at. The new lines will be more robust, but they will also allow MEA to bring on more customers.

“It’s to provide a much, much higher level of capacity than the existing line … that runs from Eklutna up to Palmer substation,” Griffith said.

And MEA wants to build them all the way into Wasilla but has run into opposition from city leaders there who worry about the effect big transmission towers will have on the city’s viewshed. City leaders have said they’d like to see the lines buried as they run through Wasilla.

Griffith said that without the big lines, Wasilla is still vulnerable to these kinds of events.

“That’s the reason you build a robust transmission system and as many substations as you’ve got money to tolerate, because it minimizes your losses and adds redundancy to the system,” he said.

He said that the lines would also allow MEA to meet Wasilla’s growth. There really isn’t a lot of room in the system for big new customers.

“If you had another 10-megawatt load show up somewhere, we would have to do something heroic to be able to handle that effectively,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.