Cold weather, outages & "peak demand"

We're not sure what the official low temperature was last night, but several people around the office reported single-digit reading at their home overnight. Tonight won't be much better as the temperature is expected to reach the low- to mid-teens.

The co-op did experience some outages Friday morning, and, yes, the freezing cold weather was the culprit. Approximately 1,800 members experienced power loss. The majority happened between 6:30 and 9:30 in the morning. McDonald's was still serving breakfast by the time our line crews had fixed most of the problems, and were working hard to solve isolated outages in different parts of our service territory.

So, how did the cold weather cause the power to go out? Think of it this way — the power lines can only carry a certain amount of electricity at any given moment. On really, really cold nights, just about everyone have their heater running all night long, which means more electricity is being used than normal. Then, people start to wake up. They turn on lights, take a hot shower, plug in their curling iron and blow dryer, turn on the stove, TV, computer, etc. At the same time, people start going to work — office lights and heaters and computers all kinds of stuff that take electricity get turned on.

When there is more demand for electricity than the power lines can provide, that's when the power goes out. It's the electrical systems way of protecting itself from a major meltdown that could take several days or more to repair. Instead of spreading across the entire system, causing everyone to lose power, only the area that was overloaded goes dark. Although it's a MAJOR inconvenience for people who live there, the isolated outage is easier for line crews to find and fix.

Kyle Baggett, Cullman EC's vice president of engineering & operations, shared this interesting bit of information with us:

"Winter peaks typically occur in the morning hours (7-9 a.m). Most everybody gets up and showers before work during those times and we get hot water heater loads in addition to home heating load. Summer peaks occur in the afternoon (4 to 7 p.m.) — driven by the hottest part of the day and people cooking dinner.