COAL CREEK CANYON, Colo. — Customers of a power company not named Xcel Energy are about to lose power because of Xcel Energy.
About 5,000 customers served by United Power in the foothills southwest of Boulder have been warned that their power will be shut off from 11 p.m. Saturday until 1:30 a.m. Sunday.
Xcel provides power through a substation in Coal Creek Canyon, which supplies electricity for United Power customers.
“I like to keep the temperatures in here, at least, in the upper 60s, if not higher,” Nico Novelli said.
Novelli lives in Coal Creek Canyon and cares for 42 animals.
“Not everybody has wolves roaming around their house and rooms full of pythons and anacondas,” Novelli said.
No, they sure do not.
But if they did, they would also know reptiles require heating pads and heat lamps.
“Most of them are in the 70s, 80s, in some cases the hotspots in their enclosures could be over 100 degrees,” Novelli said.
United Power notified him and almost 5,000 total customers about the weekend overnight power outage, on what will be the coldest day in months.
9NEWS Weather Impact Team Meteorologist Laurann Robinson said temperatures could approach freezing.
“Let Xcel know that if they’re planning things that they should check the weather," Novelli said. "Weather’s been saying it’s going to be cold this weekend for a while, so they’ve had more than a week to reschedule it.
“Unfortunately, Xcel Energy had made the decision that this needs to be done at the timeframe that it is being done now, and so we are at their mercy to decide the timing of it,” Jan Kulmann, United Power Chief Operating Officer, said.
United Power is powerless to this decision, according to Kulmann.
“We did ask them to move it to a different day," Kulmann said. "We did ask them to look at alternatives and they came back and said it was not possible."
According to Xcel, the work being done is to replace one transmission line connection with a three-way transmission switch. That would allow future outages from that substation to be isolated instead of impacting the entire canyon.
“The easy way to say it is that if the work doesn’t happen, that in the future there will be an outage of some kind. One that we cannot predict and one that will, actually, put our members at greater risk,” Kulmann said.
Kulmann said that this work has been discussed for years, and it was originally supposed to be two different outages on the same overnight, but then last week Xcel gave United Power notice that it would do part of the work last weekend.
“They did one outage last weekend," Kulmann said. "They did not notify us in a way that we were able to let our membership know about it."
“Fortunately, we were warmer, so it didn’t affect anything,” Novelli said. “We were not warned about that one, even though it was pre-scheduled.”
That outage lasted until 4:30 a.m.
“Xcel took longer to do the work than was expected,” Kulmann said. “The work that was done last week was, actually, to put in a tie to do a bypass. The outage that is scheduled for Saturday night should be a lot smaller. It’s really just to put the new piece of equipment in that’s already there. They just have to remove the bypass.”
In a statement, Xcel said the work may get postponed, but it's unlikely.
“Our crews will determine if the weather poses a safety risk to delay the transmission work. Our team does not believe the weather currently forecasted in the area tomorrow will impact our scheduled work,” an Xcel spokesman said.
Novelli is concerned about his reptiles but also worries for his neighbors in the canyon.
“I know there’s other people up here that are on respirators, CPAP machines, things like that. Having the power go off in the middle of the night’s going to be inconvenient for them,” Novelli said. “I’ll do what I have to do to keep my animals safe, so I’ll be up as many hours as I need to to run my generator.”