How businesses can better prepare for power outages
Aug. 20—When the power goes out at a home for an hour, it might mean keeping the fridge closed so food doesn't spoil. When that happens at a business, it could mean the loss of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor, lost product or even broken equipment.
So what can businesses do?
The Public Service Company of New Mexico serves about 62,000 business customers across New Mexico, from mom-and-pop shops to large industrial businesses.
Power outages from time to time are inevitable.
Elisha Saavedra-Torres, director of customer marketing at PNM, said, often, the most critical question the utility can answer for businesses when power outages occur is how long the power will be out.
"The magnitude of risk is much greater and there's perhaps a different array of risk for business customers when the power goes out," Saavedra-Torres said.
She recommended business leaders attend a yearly webinar PNM offers on how to be prepared for power outages. PNM also can tailor the training to specific business needs, Saavedra-Torres said, like copper theft, a common issue property owners in the state deal with.
"We give them helpful hints, tips and tricks for remaining safe during an outage, for identifying potential safety hazards as well, and what to do in the event that they experience or believe that they're experiencing a safety issue," she said.
Businesses can also invest in things like backup power or ask PNM to serve them through two separate feeds so if one goes out, it's not a complete power outage, she said.
"There are things that business customers can do to mitigate the risk," Saavedra-Torres said.
She encouraged businesses to respond to the business customer survey PNM sends out twice a year and reach out with any other feedback.
"The more you tell us about your needs, your experience and how we can improve, or what we're doing well, the more we can integrate that into our future offerings and how we do business with our customers," she said.
On the ground
"How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?"
That's what an Albuquerque resident remarked as he walked his dog in a neighborhood near the North Valley last week.
He was looking upon a much more complex scenario, though.
A PNM crew was in the North Valley neighborhood on Tuesday to replace an old utility pole with a new one. The operation, which took hours, required a team of four experienced linemen, a few more apprentices, a massive red crane and contracted operators, and a de-energized neighborhood.
PNM chose to do the work to prevent a future, unplanned power outage from occurring, PNM Power Operations Manager Andrew Cusimano said.
A few residents came out of their houses to watch the work that blocked off a small portion of the neighborhood's street that morning.
Normally, PNM wouldn't turn off the power at all for work of this nature, Cusimano explained. But the crew wanted to let the second-year apprentices work on the pole exchange, and apprentices aren't allowed to do work when the power is on.
"They're here to learn," said Cusimano, who went through an apprenticeship himself.
After two linemen de-energized the neighborhood, putting around 15-20 PNM customers out of power, the apprentices were allowed to get started.
But first, the pole had to get to a new location. The roughly 35-foot utility pole started out laying in the street and needed to make it to the backyard of a house where the old pole stood.
Two contracted crane operators, with the massive machinery, stood the new pole up straight on the street. Using the crane, they slowly raised the pole into the air and over the house to the backyard.
After a slow descent into a hole in the ground PNM linemen dug prior, the new utility pole was up and ready for apprentices to connect to the power grid.
The apprentices shimmied up the poles to finish the replacement job.
The pole placement alone took a couple of hours. It's an example of scheduled work PNM does to prevent unplanned power outages as much as possible, Cusimano said.
"This is the proactive work that we do to take care of outages before they happen," he said.
But the company can't anticipate other causes of power outages, like extreme weather, car crashes, branches in power lines or critters getting in the system. Cusimano joked that PNM's distribution operations center staff are amateur meteorologists.
"We are constantly watching the weather so we know three or four days out that, 'Okay, we have a possibility of 70 mile per hour gusts,'" he said.
PNM's distribution operations center, or DOC, is the hub of PNM's distribution system statewide and spearheads the power restoration process. It's staffed 24 hours every day. The utility also has up to 14 lineman constantly on-call, ready to respond to emergencies that could come up.
That could mean crews trekking up the Sandia Crest in freezing, snowy weather, which Cusimano said has happened before.
"It's a hard call to make and just say, 'Hey, I need you to go hike the crest. I know it's 20 degrees. I know it's a blizzard. As soon as the weather clears and you have the ability to go up there, we've got to get the lines back up,'" he said.
Vincent Turner, manager of the distribution operations center, explained how complicated yet important the work is that PNM does to get power outages resolved.
"As quickly as we can get out to get the power back on, we know that people can get on with their lives, that they can go about their business," Turner said.
PNM recently dealt with raging wildfires in Ruidoso, which left thousands of people without power. Other utilities in New Mexico and the broader western region of the U.S. helped PNM restore power, which took less than three weeks.
It takes an extremely severe event for PNM to call in help from other utilities, Cusimano said.
PNM's online outage map, showing all of its current outages and customers affected, can be found at www.outagemap.pnm.com/.
Customers can report a power outage to PNM online at www.pnm.com/report-an-outage, by calling (888) 342-5766 or texting #OUT to 78766.
