Can utilities prevent the extreme power outages Oregon experienced in last

Saturday morning marked day number eight without power at Elizabeth Bartolomeo’s house in Mulino. No water to drink or wash. Using water from greenhouse rain barrels to flush toilets. Generator power to the fridge. Surge protectors everywhere.

Because this is far from the first time.

But this power outage was worse. Longer. No restoration information on Portland General Electric’s website. No luck on the phone. More than a week in, no utility trucks on her road in rural Clackamas County.

The electricity finally came back Saturday midmorning. But Bartolomeo was far from appeased.

Worse things happened. Four people and a dog in Clackamas County died in three separate instances of carbon monoxide poisoning. Medically vulnerable customers were put at risk. Appliances fried in power surges. Hundreds of roads were blocked by downed trees, branches and power lines. Countless people endured spoiled food, cold showers and the difficulty of continuing remote school and work without internet service.

In short, when electricity, the lifeblood of modern living, goes out, chaos and sometimes tragedy follow.

The power outages experienced in the Willamette Valley over the past week are nothing like those experienced in Texas, where surging demand, power plant outages and lack of access to backup electricity supplies forced grid operators into rolling and extended blackouts that affected millions of customers across the state.

Closer to home, the problem was three waves of weather that began Thursday, Feb. 11, in the lower Willamette Valley and got worse with successive waves of icing that moved north over the weekend. More than a week later, the outage numbers had declined from a high of about 340,000 around Oregon to some 42,000 midday on Saturday.

Oregon’s outages have little to do with surging demand or available electricity, but repeated failures of transmission and distribution lines that aren’t designed to carry such heavy loads of ice, and problems with falling trees and branches that went well beyond the scope of state rules requiring utilities to keep vegetation around their infrastructure clear.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact of that kind of weather, which left large swaths of PGE’s, and to a lesser extent PacifiCorp’s, service territories looking like a war zone. Their restoration efforts, in many ways, have been a minor miracle, even as tens of thousands have been left in the cold. PGE’s customers were particularly hard hit because of where the storm hit and the fact that it has a larger, denser customer base and transmission system.

Yet Oregon regulators have identified repeated failures by the state’s two largest electric utilities in keeping up with tree trimming, preventing vegetation from contacting conductors and maintaining required clearances. Last year, regulators told both utilities that their vegetation management programs were deficient, and that may have exacerbated problems last week.

Inevitably, last week’s storm will prompt public and private conversations about what can be done to prevent the situation from recurring.

Utility officials say it is possible to harden the grid against such outages and increase their system’s resiliency through stepped up tree and vegetation trimming, advanced grid technology and other infrastructure improvements. Utilities are already moving on those fronts, but there are limitations and tradeoffs, and the solutions often come with a steep price tag.

“We will learn from this event,” said Larry Bekkedahl, vice president of grid architecture at PGE, which saw a peak of more than 300,000 customers affected by blackouts. Given enough money, he said, engineers can design a solution to almost anything. The question is the cost versus benefit.

“Is this going to be a 40- or 50-year storm? Or maybe this is happening more often,” he said.

“Ultimately it is the customer who is either impacted or is paying for it, and we want to make sure we’re doing the right things.”

Vegetation management

Utilities’ vegetation management programs are clearly a piece of the problem — and the solution.

One of the programs’ primary aims is to reduce wildfire risks, particularly in rural areas. But the strategy has obvious implications during wind and ice storms, too: If trees and branches are farther from lines and poles, they’re less likely to take them down when they fall.

Safety staff at the Public Utility Commission conduct annual field inspections to sample the utilities’ tree trimming programs, identify vegetation touching overhead lines, and ensure utilities are maintaining the state’s mandated line clearances.

Last year’s audits noted serious problems and violations for both companies.

The PUC issued a “warning” notice to PGE that based on its review of its system, its vegetation maintenance “appears to have deficiencies that are potentially systemwide.” In a review of “various” urban and rural areas, regulators found “719…