By: Bill Robertson • Contributing Columnist
Saturday, April 26, was what Foster Campbell described as “a beautiful spring day” in northwest Louisiana. Then, at shortly after 4 p.m., the Shreveport power company that he regulates at the state Public Service Commission abruptly turned out the lights on 32,000 of its customers.
It was an unplanned outage for the Southwestern Electric Power Co. Some of its customers were out as long as six hours.
Residential, commercial and other SWEPCO customers across portions of Caddo, Bossier and Webster parishes were affected.
There was no storm. None of SWEPCO’s equipment failed.
The outage was what the utility industry calls a “load shed.” SWEPCO received orders from the Arkansas-based nonprofit organization that controls its electricity transmission system to immediately “shed,” or eliminate, 140 megawatts of electric load.
The alternative was to risk equipment failure and a much larger outage that could take weeks or longer to fix.
The nonprofit transmission organization is called the Southwest Power Pool.
SPP is one of 10 regional transmission organizations authorized by the U.S. Government to control the flow of electricity across multiple utilities in multiple states.
SPP is based in Little Rock. It started in 1941 when 11 regional utilities (including predecessors to SWEPCO and New Orleans-based Entergy) pooled resources to power an Arkansas aluminum plant critical to the war effort. SPP became a nonprofit corporation in 1994 and was approved as an RTO by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2004.
SPP serves central and southern states: all of Kansas and Oklahoma and parts of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Members include investor-owned utilities like SWEPCO as well as municipal systems, generation and transmission cooperatives, state authorities, independent power producers and power marketers.
To grasp its size and scope, consider that SPP covers a region of more than 500,000 square miles, dispatches power from 1,000 generating plants and controls nearly 73,000 miles of transmission line.
Understanding SPP and where U.S. electric utilities are today helps inform understanding of the unplanned SWEPCO outage of April 26. The industry that these power entities inhabit is big, complex and infused with money, and tends to speak its own language (for example, “shed load”).
“We deeply regret the outage,” said SPP President Lanny Nickell. He is an engineer and 28-year SPP employee who assumed the President / CEO job just 25 days before the outage.
Nickell said SWEPCO suffered a similar unplanned outage less than 30 days ago, a shorter-duration event caused by stormy weather. He said the utility had suffered “very difficult conditions” over the last few weeks.
“Our driver is reliability,” Nickell said, “not profits or one company’s interest over others. It (ordering the load shed) was a step we did not take lightly.
It was a last recourse to minimize the chance of worse outages.”
Nickell said the Shreveport area suffered higher-than-expected temperatures on April 26, driving up power demand. That, combined with a shortage of generation to serve that power, triggered the SPP order. At least two SWEPCO power plants were down for maintenance work that the utility and SPP typically schedule during the “shoulder” months of spring and fall, when demand lessens.
“We hate having to turn the power off,” said SWEPCO President Brett Mattison. At Campbell’s news conference Tuesday, Mattison sat opposite Nickell, with Campbell in the center. Mattison said the outage was “a last resort” that, had it not been carried out, could have led to major equipment failure and caused thousands more customers to lose power.
Mattison likened the SWEPCO electrical system to a home with electrical breaker switches that prevent whole-house failures. April 26 was “tripping breakers” for the company.
Campbell spoke for the customers, particularly businesses like restaurants forced to close despite expectations of a busy Saturday night. He said he has instructed Nickell and Mattison to attend the next LPSC meeting, scheduled May 19 in Lafayette, to answer questions.
“We will examine the event at the PSC,” Campbell said. “People who were out ought to be compensated. Businesses lost revenue. How are we going to help them?”
Mattison said environmental issues have loomed large over power companies in recent years. SWEPCO is emerging from a lengthy period of dependence on abundant local deposits of lignite as its fuel of choice for power generation. Lignite is referred to as “poor man’s coal.” That is because it has a low carbon content, low heating value and high moisture content, making it less efficient, more polluting, and less desirable than higher-grade coals such as bituminous or anthracite.
Diversifying its generation mix, SWEPCO has invested in large wind farms across Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas. This year SWEPCO will begin buying solar power from the 75-megawatt Rocking R Solar Plant in north Caddo Parish.
A steadfast supporter of wind and solar power, Campbell nevertheless joined Nickell and Mattison in making scant reference to Climate Change at the Tuesday news conference. As an environmental issue it rises above all others, and confronting it drives many of the trends affecting electric power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration earlier this year said deployment of clean wind and solar power and batteries had collectively amounted to 93 percent of new utility-scale electric generation so far in 2025.
Whether they spoke the words or not, Climate Change was a factor in the Saturday outage. RTOs like SPP are growing in importance in part as a way to expand utilities’ access to renewable wind and solar power, and retirement of dirty lignite plants is how companies like SWEPCO can address the future.
Then there is the flawed weather forecast relied upon by SPP when it forced SWEPCO into the outage. The “beautiful spring day,” as Campbell characterized April 26, was actually hot and humid, not unlike the weather we experience in July and August. When SPP’s staff recognized that a rain front they expected to hit Shreveport actually veered to the north, they saw our demand for electricity spike.
With the SWEPCO generators down for maintenance, they rang the alarms and triggered the load shed.
Bill Robertson was chief of staff to Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell from 2003 to 2021. He is a journalist and government relations consultant in Shreveport.