Xcel shuts off power on snowy, cold day for equipment maintenance

SAINT MARY’S, Colorado — Xcel excels at planned power outages when the weather gets cold.

On Monday, about 400 customers lost power in the part of Idaho Springs known as Alice/St. Mary’s Glacier.

On Saturday night into Sunday morning, about 5,000 United Power customers had their power shutoff when Xcel made improvements to a transmission line servicing United Power.

“This morning, when I checked my phone, it was 25 degrees out. That was about 20-30 minutes before they cut the power off on us,” Daniel Lutz, an Xcel customer in Alice/St Mary’s Glacier, said.

“We have weather, I mean, it’s snowing. It’s raining. It’s windy. It’s cold,” Wren Miller said, another Xcel customer in the Winterland part of St. Mary’s Glacier.

Both received warnings about the power shutoff this weekend.

“I wrote it down when I got home from church yesterday. So, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Xcel was off,” Miller said.

Lutz called Xcel to question the outage since the weather was supposed to be cold overnight and into the morning.

“They said that it was 40 degrees, which down there [where the work was happening] it probably was. They’re about 2,000 feet in elevation below us, but their work still cut our power off,” Lutz said.

“I had a text message from Daniel telling me to call Xcel and make complaints because it was so bloody cold, which I was totally on board with because I thought it was asinine that we had all the weather that was coming in and they had this planned outage,” Miller said.

It snowed overnight and was still flurrying off and on Monday, with below-freezing wind chills.

“We thought it was going to be in the 40s, which we wouldn’t have had a problem if we were in the 40s, but we’re in the 20s and we’re below freezing, and that’s rough,” Lutz said.

Xcel said the work on Monday was to “strengthen our electric system and reduce wildfire risk.”

An Xcel spokesman said a wood power pole was replaced with a taller fiberglass pole with six cross arms.

Lutz received text messages updating the progress, while Miller received phone calls. None were accurate.

“Notification that it would be on at 9:45 [a.m.]. Then we got 11:15 [a.m.]. And then we got 5:15 [p.m.],” Lutz said.

The power came on around 1 p.m.

“We’re getting a lot of confusing messages and information,” Lutz said. “And that’s probably the most frustrating thing is trying to figure out how we can work around this, work around the cold temperatures, without knowing exactly how long we’re going to have to do it.”

Xcel said it has performed 3,581 planned outages since January this year and 2,141 in the first 10 months of 2023. Of all those, Xcel said 99.9% were performed on time and within the timeframe communicated to customers.

The statement from Xcel did not address why the outage was conducted with fresh snow and below-freezing wind chills.