Valley hit with pair of power outages

WASILLA — Some 10,000 Matanuska Electric Association customers suffered through a double-whammy of sorts over the weekend after a pair of evening power outages kept crews busy Friday and Sunday.

Friday’s outage was fairly localized to the Knik-Goose Bay Road area south of Wasilla, while Sunday’s event was tied to a much larger outage that affected thousands in Anchorage, Eagle River and the Valley. MEA serves parts of the Eagle River area.

MEA director of public relations Julie Estey said Monday both outages primarily originated with Chugach Electric and Municipal Light and Power facilities.

Friday’s outage affected around 3,200 off Knik-Goose Bay, Estey said.

“We checked out all of our facilities and everything looked OK,” Estey said. “Chugach was looking at issues with a possible switch or substation.”

She added the Chugach-owned Teeland substation, which is located along Knik-Goose Bay, was being checked.

“Teeland was used as their hub when MEA purchased power from them,” Estey said, adding that the substation connects to the Railbelt power Intertie and feeds MEA’s Theodore substation.

Power was restored within an hour for most residents, with the few sporadic outages that remained cleared soon after.

Sunday’s outage was part of a widespread event that left more than 50,000 Anchorage residents without power starting around 7 p.m. Some 10,300 MEA customers were affected, Estey said.

According to a statement Monday from Chugach corporate communications manager Julie Hasquet, Municipal Light and Power’s Plant 2 in east Anchorage tripped off when a cooling fan failed. Shortly thereafter the Southcentral Power Plant near Minnesota Drive went down, triggering a load shedding procedure in which the utilities take substations offline to avoid overburdening the system.

“The six Railbelt utilities have collaborated to develop shared protocols to handle this situation, with each utility shedding a small portion of their load to stabilize the system,” Estey said. “The load shed plan was effective.

“Unfortunately, the MEA Theodore substation was one of the next in the rotation to be taken down in the process, so some of those customers along KGB got hit again,” she added.

Estey said MEA’s Eklutna Generation Station ramped up its capacity after the Anchorage plants went down. MEA customers were without power for between 30 and 50 minutes, depending on their location, she added.

“When that much power generation is lost, the entire system is affected,” Estey said. “The way the Eklutna plant was built enables us to ramp-up quickly.”

Contact reporter Steven Merritt at 352-2269 or steven.merritt@frontiersman.com