The Watkins Glen Electric System plans to replace and upgrade weaker parts of the village’s electric system that recently led to two village-wide outages.
The upgrades are planned for this spring. Jimmy Ballard, Watkins Glen Electric Department Supervisor, said the outages are not a continuous threat.
On Saturday, Feb. 7, and Sunday, Feb. 15, the village suffered electric outages that lasted 4-5 hours, closing businesses, restaurants and bars, leaving homes and apartments temporarily without electric power.
“The outages were kind of fluke accidents,” Ballard said. “But we’re working on it, trying to shed load and improve the system as best we can.”
The Feb. 7 village-wide power outage was caused by an overload to the systems due to extreme cold temperatures and increased use of electrical heat.
“A lot of people have upgraded to electric heat from the gas that they’ve used over the last 50 to 100 years,” Ballard said. “That added load imbalance caused the breaker to trip out for safety reasons for high thermal and that substation circuit failed out.”
OFF THE GRID: United States Power Outage Tracker
On Feb. 15, parts at the substation were weakened, and the lightning arrester failed.
“The lightning arrester grounded out to protect the system, causing some stress,” Ballard said. “That weakened the system and that is what caused the Feb. 15 transformer outage. The two are kind of related. Temporary improvements to the system have been made and there’s not much of a threat to happen in the future.”
Ballard said the transformer that has twice failed is about 25 years old and a new transformer will be installed in the early spring.
“When the weather gets nicer this spring, we will do an outage and start replacing and upgrading those weaker parts of the system that we have found,” Ballard said.
This article originally appeared on The Leader: Why Watkins Glen’s electric failed in village on consecutive weekends
Reporting by Jeff Smith, Elmira Star-Gazette / The Leader
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
