Business assignment editor Matt Kempner contributed to this article.
In the past decade, Georgia Power has spent more than $350 million — much of it public money — to better track and manage power usage, moves that were supposed to result in fewer outages and faster responses.
The publicly regulated utility also has stepped up its efforts to keep trees trimmed in power line right of ways.
But Georgians found out last week that making the electric system smarter and the trees shorter is no match for ice and freezing rain.
Throughout the state, hundreds of thousands lost power in a wide-spread ice storm as trees crashed into wires and brought down utility poles. The loss of electricity frustrated and potentially endangered thousands of Georgians who sat in the cold, sometimes for more than a day.
The storm knocked out more than 700,000 Georgia Power customers since Wednesday, and about 49,000 were still without power Saturday morning, mostly in the Augusta area. At least 95 percent restoration was expected before midnight.
New technology has helped, said Paul Bowers, the utility’s president and CEO. By comparison, in the “Blizzard of 1993,” it took seven days to restore power to more than 300,000 Georgia Power customers, Bowers said. Some areas, like Augusta, got upwards of an inch of ice.
“We’ve never had an inch of ice before,” Bowers said in an exclusive interview Saturday morning with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Fourteen years after a similar storm caused massive outages in the area, Georgia electric companies still have a big problem battling ice.
In metro Atlanta, trees often fall on windy or rainy days. When they do, they often take out power lines, even when they are the required distance away. The effects are multiplied by ice. And, while Georgia Power’s advanced technology is able to quickly determine what’s happened and in some cases remotely re-route power around damage, customers without power are still in the dark until a repair crew can get there.
Iesha Lawrence, who lives in south Fulton, said she’s used to falling trees knocking out power across the region. But she said her power was off for at least 18 hours during the storm and she expected better. Lawrence, who is nine months pregnant, said the temperature in her house dropped to 48 degrees and she, her husband and son spent the night in the cold.
“It’s a bigger issue than this winter storm. It’s how are we taking care of our infrastructure?” she said. “If this was the plan, we need a new plan.”
Areas north of Atlanta got ice and snow, but it was freezing rain that cut across the state south of I-20, hammering south metro communities and delivering a knockout blow to Augusta. Statewide, more than 865,000 homes and businesses lost power, affecting an estimated 1.8 million people.
Forecasts Tuesday from the National Weather Service called for icy rain, which causes the most damage to power lines, in a triangle south of I-85 and north of I-16, with the I-20 corridor smack in the middle. Georgia Power officials said they positioned about a third of its resources north of I-20 and the other two-thirds south of the interstate and east to Augusta.
When much of the freezing rain stayed south of I-20, Georgia Power had to quickly re-position many of the 8,000 people they had ready to restore power around the state.
“It tracked a little farther south of the city than we expected,” Georgia Power spokesman Jacob Hawkins said.
The lighter snow and sleet that fell north of I-20 did far less damage to trees and power lines, and residents there experienced outages that were relatively contained.
Frozen precipitation is bad for power lines, but freezing rain is worse than sleet or snow, said Kevin Underwood, a line crew supervisor for Walton EMC in Snellville, which was spared the worst.
Freezing rain, he said, coats everything it touches, putting greater weight on power lines and trees than other winter precipitation. But it’s not just snapped limbs and trees that can bring down lines. The lines themselves can snap when coated with heavy ice.
Restoring power in an area ravaged by an ice storm can be a time-consuming process.
First, crews have to travel over slick roads to areas often untouched by salt trucks and plows. Line workers also have to remove fallen trees and damaged equipment.
Sometimes, crews have to replace utility poles or important equipment, such as transformers, and re-string thousands of feet of electrical cable to restore service. The outages can also linger as weakened trees fall on lines workers have already repaired.
Trimming the trees
In 2000, when an ice storm blacked out nearly half a million homes and businesses — some 50,000 for at least three days after the storm — the big problem was also trees.
Georgia’s ubiquitous pine trees are brittle and top heavy, and their canopies collect heavy ice and break, said Kent Frantz, lead meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. Also, though last year was a particularly rainy one for Georgia, Frantz said the state has suffered through about a decade of drought. Trees have been weakened.
“It’s not only the weather, but it’s also the luck of the draw in what trees are going to do, what the impacts are,” Frantz said.
At Georgia Power, trees near home power lines are trimmed every three and a half years, on average. Those near high-voltage transmission lines are culled every eight to 10 years, but those lines tend to be higher and have a wider right-of-way.
Across the country, utilities have become more aggressive in their tree trimming, said Stan Wise, a Georgia Public Service Commissioner. It stems from the 2003 blackout across much of the Northeast and into Canada, which was caused, in part, by a rogue tree.
Federal rules require trimming trees that are near power lines, but the biggest challenge in weather like this is falling trees that are outside the right-of-way.
“Trees sometimes are very tall,” said Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, director of the Spatial Analysis Laboratory at the University of Vermont. “They can be far away and can still take out a utility line.”
Downed trees left three quarters of Tri-County EMC’s 21,000 customers in the dark, said Greg Mullis, a vice president for energy services for the electrical co-op that services parts of eight counties between Macon and Lake Oconee. On one stretch of line, crews found about 20 toppled trees, he said.
In Rockdale County, power lines coated with icicles sagged between poles along Ga. 20 near Conyers. Walton typically trims trees back 15 feet from either side of the lines. But “sometimes it doesn’t matter how clear your right-of-way is,” said Underwood, with Walton EMC.
To solve the problem, it would seem, the state must only pare back its trees. But it’s not that easy.
In the summer, the canopy provides shade from the heat, so people run their air conditioners less. That reduces the strain on the electrical grid. There are aesthetic issues, too. People like their trees and often get angry when the pruners come.
Smarter power
In spite of the large number of people in the dark during this latest winter storm, new technology may have helped a lot more people’s power stay on, and led to faster response times.
Last month, Georgia Power finished the installation of what is known as Smart Grid technology on 174 feeder lines. As of September, lines using that technology were 36 percent less likely to experience an outage, the company said. And when outages did occur, they were 37 percent shorter.
No data was available about the impact of the upgrades for this storm, but Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft said it made a difference. Clark Gellings, a fellow with the Electric Power Research Institute, said the technology had “great potential” to lessen the impact of a storm.
“It will generally help get things back together more quickly,” he said.
The power grid is mostly mechanical, but the smart additions add digital devices that can create what is known as a self-healing network. Think of it like a string of Christmas tree lights: Instead of losing all power to the rest of the line when one bulb goes, power companies now have the ability to route around a specific point to ensure the rest of the string stays lit.
Bowers, the Georgia Power chief executive, said investments have paid off for ratepayers.
“Last year was the best in our history for wire reliability,” he said.
Customers who lost power for a few minutes, or only experienced a flicker, were likely kept from longer outages by those upgrades, said Patty Durand, executive director of the nonprofit Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative.
“Absolutely, there are fewer people” without power because of it, she said.
Smart meters that have been installed across Georgia also mean that outages are reported faster. When the power goes, they let out what is known as a “last gasp,” alerting companies of a problem. In the past, power companies had to depend on customers’ phone calls to know if there was no power. Now, linemen are able to get to work more quickly, and with more information.
Even with the new technology, it can take a long time to actually make the necessary repairs that bring the power back on.
“Trees must still be cut away, poles must still be replaced, and lines must be spliced and reconductored,” Mullis, with Tri-County EMC, said in an email. “With thousands of trees down, you can understand how such a labor intensive process can be VERY slow.”
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