Watkins Glen Electric System plans to replace and upgrade a weak section of the village’s electrical system that recently caused two village-wide blackouts.
The upgrade is planned for this spring. Jimmy Ballard, director of the Watkins Glen Electric Department, said outages are not an ongoing threat.
The village experienced a power outage lasting 4-5 hours on Saturday, February 7, and Sunday, February 15, which resulted in the closure of businesses, restaurants and bars, and the temporary loss of power to homes and apartments.
“The outage was a fluke,” Ballard said. “But we are working hard to try to reduce the load and improve the system.”
On February 7, a village-wide power outage occurred as extremely cold temperatures and increased use of electric heat overloaded the system.
“A lot of people have upgraded to electric heat from the natural gas they’ve had for the past 50 to 100 years,” Ballard said. “The increased load imbalance caused circuit breakers to trip for thermal safety reasons and substation circuits failed.”
Blackouts: US Power Outage Tracker
On February 15, some components of the substation experienced a power outage and the lightning arrester failed.
“The arresters were grounded to protect the system, which caused some stress,” Ballard said. “This weakened the system, which is what caused the transformer outage on February 15. There is a certain correlation. The system has been temporarily improved and there will not be much of a threat in the future.”
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Ballard said the transformers that failed twice were about 25 years old and new ones would be installed in early spring.
“When the weather improves this spring, we will conduct outages and begin replacing and upgrading the weaker parts of the system that we identify,” Ballard said.
This article originally appeared in The Leader: How Watkins Glen Village plans to address power outages
