The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
GCEA to try again before dawn on Thursday
By Olivia Lueckemeyer
Riverland to Gothic townsite lost power for just over half an hour on Monday after the Gunnison County Electric Association (GCEA) attempted to transfer the power feed from one transformer to another in order to perform upgrades to the system.
GCEA chief operations officer Roger Grogg explained that the 90-step switching order process was almost complete when the new protection relay, installed by GCEA’s power supplier Tri-State G&T, perceived one of the final switches as a fault, causing the system to shut down as a precautionary measure.
“Once it sensed a problem it automatically by computer opened every breaker in the substation yard,” Grogg said. “It dropped the whole system in order to protect the transformer.”
Power was lost from 4:23 p.m. to 5:08 p.m., with some areas regaining electricity slightly earlier, thanks to the diligence of the crew on hand that worked quickly to resolve the issue. Upgrades still need to be made to the second transformer, so GCEA plans to try again on Thursday, but this time the company is taking extra precautions to avoid impacting its customer base.
“The company realizes that July and August are when people make their money up here, so we aren’t going to try to do this in the daytime,” Grogg said. “We are going to bring crews in around 4 a.m. to try to minimize the impact, so if we do have an issue, hopefully by 6 a.m. everybody is back up and running.”
Tri-State G&T is in the midst of making nearly $1 million of improvements to the Crested Butte substation, which will include transformer protection upgrades, improved system monitoring, a new circuit switcher, and more.
“We want to take advantage of this for our members, but sometimes you have hiccups when you start putting it all together,” Grogg said.
An earlier, seven-minute power outage around 2:30 p.m. on Monday that affected the sewer plant, the school and a portion of the east side of town was unrelated to the later outage, and was probably caused by a grounding problem with the breaker, Grogg explained. However, the late noon bell, which rang at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, was probably due to a lag in the town’s system as a side effect of Monday’s second outage, which lasted almost exactly a half hour in town.
