PUD asks Crescent Bar residents to conserve power
A small Grant County Public Utility District substation in Moses Lake near Division Avenue. While much of the county, like Moses Lake is in good shape, the PUD has had concerns about the Crescent Bar area.
CHARLES H. FEATHERSTONE/COLUMBIA BASIN HERALD
EPHRATA — Officials with the Grant County Public Utility District took an unusual step late Wednesday and issued a request to its customers in the Crescent Bar and Trinidad areas to turn off unneeded appliances and limit their power use in order to avoid a blackout.
“There was more demand than we thought we might be able to supply,” said Grant PUD spokesperson Christine Pratt. “There were no outages, but we just put that message out to get people to conserve.”
At 4:58 p.m. on Wednesday, the PUD posted a request on its Facebook page asking its 933 customers in Crescent Bar and Trinidad — located south of S.R. 28 along the Columbia River — to turn off holiday lights, turn down thermostats and hot tub temperatures, and refrain from doing laundry in order to prevent a system overload and a local blackout.
The PUD rescinded its request at 8:25 p.m. after making adjustments to its power transmission system, a subsequent statement said. Pratt said the area is served by one transmission line from a PUD substantiation in Quincy.
“The area has grown really fast in the last 10 years, and the supply has not kept up,” she said. “We don’t know that there would have been an outage, but we issued it as just a precaution.”
While extreme hot and cold temperatures can affect the efficiency of electrical transmission lines and the performance of transformers, Pratt said the issue in Crescent Bar and Trinidad was primarily increased power demand and not any change in the performance of equipment.
“There would not have been problems under normal temperatures, but people are using more power to stay warm,” Pratt said.
Even with the bitter cold that has descended upon Grant County this week — temperatures at the Grant County International Airport hit a low of -6 Fahrenheit Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service — Pratt said the PUD has not seen or heard of any other power-related concerns in its service area.
David Vowels, a spokesperson for Spokane-based Avista, which provides electricity to residential and business customers in Adams County, wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald that the company continues to monitor energy demand and use across its service area.
“We are seeing our electric system capacity stresses during this cold snap but we have not issued a request to conserve,” he wrote. “That being said, it is always a benefit to the overall electric system when customers conserve energy, particularly during the morning and evening hours when usage is peaking.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.