Town Council Warned of Possible Power Outages

By Alex Malm

During the Feb. 22 Town Council meeting the members heard from local State Rep. Douglas Thomas in regards to concerns about the power supply in New England.

He explained that he attended a webinar with ISO New England, which controls and manages the New England power grid.

“The reason why the webinar is important is because of a notice that ISO New England issued a short while ago, a notice that ISO New England has never issued before,” said Thomas.

He said that they may get to the point in the near future where there isn’t enough power being generated in New England in order to keep up with the demand, especially during unusual cold snaps.

Dave Cloutier Director of System operations from Eversource explained that at first there would be a time period of heightened awareness where they make requests for people to conserve power usage.

“If that fails there will be an emergency declared,” said Cloutier.

He said that would hopefully hear from ISO several days in advance about a shortage of energy. He said that they would then have to turn off the number of customers that they tell them to. If it’s going to be a long period of time they would rotate customers so it’s not a long block of time at once.

Cloutier said that they would prioritize the list so it makes sense including having hospitals at the bottom of the list.

Allison McLean from Eversource said that it’s important that the Town is preparing for it now and that they can help them with it. She also noted that unlike power outages during storms the police and fire departments would be included in the outage.

Thomas said that much of the reason for the problem in generating enough power to the grid comes from too little natural gas, which is necessary more in cold winter month. He added that the pipelines aren’t big enough to supply power plants.

One question that was asked was if the outages would only happen during cold weather.

Cloutier said that it can happen any day of the year depending on how much power is generated in New England. He said that they are more concerned during the winter because home heating uses a lot of natural gas.

Town Councilor Tom Dolan asked about people with generators and was told that it would be like any other outage that happened.

“For the customer it’s going to be like any standard outage,” said Cloutier.

Town Council Chairman John Farrell said he was concerned especially if hospitals aren’t able to have power.

“Godforbid you take a hospital offline,” said Farrell.

Town Councilor Deb Paul asked how Eversource and other companies would be correcting the situation and how they are going to make it up to the people affected by the power outages.

“How are you guys going to compensate for your poor vision to the resident, and the community and municipalities and the hospitals, for your inability to foresee what was going to happen considering your rates go up considerably,” said Paul.

In regard to correcting the issue, Thomas said that some efforts were made to correct things but residents shot down the North Pass project and the gas line expansion project.

Farrell said that the State needs to come up with a solution to the problem.

“Someone in Concord needs to get their act together and figure out what we’re going to do next,” said Farrell.

Farrell closed by saying that he wasn’t happy with what they are facing.

“How ridiculous is it that we’re sitting here having this conversation,” said Farrell.