Slowly, the real story is being pieced together on why 30,000 households lost electricity Saturday and Sunday--some up to 7 hours.
A news conference this morning with Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell and the head cheeses of SWEPCO and Southwest Power Pool (SPP) revealed many facts, but left many questions unanswered. An upcoming Public Service Commission in Lafayette on May 19 should provide more information.
At this stage of the game, it appears that most if not all the blame goes to the SPP and its Executive Director who is now in his 29th day in this position.
SPP forecasts of the weekend heat were clearly too low as well the estimates on electricity consumption.
Additionally, SPP approved the schedule of maintenance of two SWEPCO power plants that reduced the available SWEPCO power capacity for this area. SPP is charged with making the needed energy capacity forecasts in the process of scheduling maintenance plant closings by SWEPCO.
SPP calls the shots on shutting down power plants and on shutting off power to areas in emergency situations.
Campbell pushed for more reliability of power from both SWEPCO and SPP and for payment to customers/businesses that had monetary losses to the power outage.
More info to come.