Silverthorne Town Council met with Xcel Energy Wednesday and discussed a recent wave of lengthy power outages.
Xcel confirms it will soon be upgrading equipment and fixing “systems” in Summit County. One of those systems is the “enhanced powerline safety setting,” or EPSS. It shuts off power to entire neighborhoods when a power line is hit by a tree branch or even an animal.
Turning the power back on after an EPSS outage means patrolling the entire line. Sometimes Xcel crews find no obvious culprit, like the nearly four-hour outage in Frisco and Copper the morning of Aug. 14.
Xcel admits this system is new. It can be touchy. The utility is fine tuning it here and statewide.
But Xcel is willing to catch flak. EPSS is meant to prevent wildfires, like the devastating Marshall Fire of December 2021, when Xcel was partly to blame for widespread damage and death on the Front Range.
“Due to the high wildfire threat in the region at this time, we are taking extreme care to visually inspect our lines to ensure these incidents do not create a wildfire risk or ignition,” Xcel said in a statement. “Those inspections may make these outages longer, but it provides the necessary confirmation that we are not putting the public’s safety at risk.”