Two to three hour power outage blamed on relay protection inside Nushagak Cooperative plant. Summer load increases not expected to cause blackouts.
Last night Nushagak Cooperative members in Dillingham experienced a two hour power outage beginning around eleven pm. Members up the Lake Road experienced a three hour outage. Bob Armstrong is the electric operations manager for Nushagak Cooperative. He says the outage was caused internally.
“We had a failure in the plant. Lost, lost generation all together. Right now we’re still evaluating. We do think it was something to do with the relay protection inside the plant.”
Armstrong says the outage was not caused by a higher summer load and that updates have been made after rolling black outs in previous summers.
“We have rebuilt a couple motors that were due, so everything is ready to go. Our new substation is in service, have no troubles whatsoever out of it so far. Everything’s working like it should. That’s not to say that you won’t have failures. Anything mechanical can fail as we all know. But everything that could be looked at has been looked at.”
Armstrong says the peak load is higher in the summer at around five megawatts. This winter peak load was around two megawatts due to colder temperatures.
Contact the author at allison@kdlg.org or (907) 842-5281.