Power was cut to much of Western South Dakota and Wyoming Thursday. Black Hills Energy explains the work they did to restore power to Western South Dakota and beyond.
According to a social media post from Black Hills Energy, the outage comes from a transmission facility located outside of our system that caused generation facilities and substations in both South Dakota and Wyoming to go offline.
The outage began around 1:40 p.m. MST and lasted until 8:30 p.m. MST.
The Monument in Rapid City also saw delays for a concert that night for the group Pentatonix, due to the outage.
Wes Ashton, Vice President of Black Hills Energy, said in an interview with KELOLAND News that the outage stems from an event that occurred at a regional grid in the northwest part of the country.
“When that impact occurred, that had impacts beyond the scale of the utility and went into other states and other utilities as a result,” Ashton said. “So there were several known events and issues that occurred across third parties yesterday.”
Ashton said when it reached the Black Hills Electric grid the system was forced to shut down.
“Our system essentially did what it was supposed to do and what it’s designed to do, where when there were frequency issues with voltage or power quality issues, the system protects itself and shuts down,” Ashton said. “That allowed us to go from a system that was completely down with 77,000+ customers, our entire customer network being disrupted from service to getting every single customer back on by the evening hours that same day.”
Ashton added there was no damage to any of their systems, due to their protections they have implemented.
Ashton said while Black Hills Energy is back up and running again, they are still learning the full impacts of yesterday’s outage, saying their coverage area wasn’t the only one affected with customer impacts in multiple states and other utilities.
“Our service territory, the legacy utility for Black Hills Energy, we serve in western South Dakota, the northern hills, the southern hills, and then the area surrounding Rapid City, and then our service territory extends over into northeast Wyoming and up into southeast Montana and so that was the area that that our customers had a service interruption,” Ashton said.
“It essentially is reenergizing a system in its entirety and so how that goes is a multi-phased approach first off, we have to focus on safety, not only for our team and our customers, but with that focus on safety and stability, it’s essentially a phased-in process to bring the power back on,”
Ashton said with an outage like this it all starts with generation and ensuring things like power plants and renewable energy are undamaged.
“We take our different generation facilities and make sure they are without damage and so once the generation is there, then we ramp those back up slowly into our transmission system, then we’ll re-energize our transmission lines and that’s the high voltage, large movement of power,” Ashton said.
Ashton said once they get the transmission system up and going then they will go back and start re-energizing components or segments of our distribution system.
“So we went through a segment-by-segment restoration and so that’s why over the afternoon yesterday, we had some customers back on early afternoon and then every hour we would have a new update as we continue to reenergize different components of the system,” Ashton said.
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Ashton explained that due to their segment-by-segment planning it allows for a much shorter time frame for restorations.
“We have a very redundant system in place so that if a particular line or an area were to lose power to avoid that disruption a longer term, we’ll have our teams look and say, is there a way to move that power around within our system to get them back on sooner than later,” Ashton said. “That’s why throughout the day you would see some areas that were restored and others that were not.”
Brendyn Medina, Public Information Officer for the Rapid City Police Department, said they had over 30 intersections where officers or first responders were directing traffic.
“With having somebody there helping direct traffic through them, but, despite all that, the calls for service don’t stop coming through,” Medina said. “So were able to manage calls for service in addition to having the extra staff out there, helping direct traffic in some of these intersections.”
Medina said it took a lot of work from police, fire, and medical staff and is thankful for everyone who put in the extra time.
“I know our criminal investigations division stepped up, we had detectives that suited up and uniforms that went out and took intersections and helped make sure that we got through that power outage,” Medina said. “Just making sure that, everybody was getting through those intersections safely was the big priority.”
