photo by: Mike Yoder/Journal-World File Photo

A flock of birds glides over a field east of Evergy's Lawrence Energy Center in this file photo.

Earlier this month as rolling power blackouts crawled across Kansas, a couple of numbers stuck in the minds of residents: 20 below zero and 1 hour.

The first was the outside temperature in many parts of the state. The second was the maximum amount of time that Evergy, the state’s largest electric utility, originally had estimated any home would be without power during the winter storm.

Those estimates ended up being wrong. A literal arctic blast across the central U.S. was threatening a figurative meltdown of the region’s power grid. The rolling blackouts — planned, temporary outages of power that move from one neighborhood to the next — were the main weapon for warding off a collapse of the power grid that stretches from the Dakotas to Texas.

As that battle progressed, the one-hour estimate cracked like an ungloved hand in a polar vortex. The rolling blackouts had a flat tire, or two, as residents reported blackouts that were lasting three, four or five times longer than expected.

Statistically speaking, most Kansans avoided a blackout, but it wasn’t difficult to find people who experienced an unexpectedly long one. Just ask Andrew French. As the chair of the Kansas Corporation Commission, he’s the top energy regulator in the state.

“I’m one of three commissioners,” French said. “I can tell you that one of my fellow commissioners was without power for almost four hours. It impacted all types of people.”

They weren’t hard to hear from either. On Feb. 15 and Feb. 16 — the days when blackouts were most prevalent in Lawrence — the phones in the Journal-World’s office rang frequently. It was like a reverse auction at times. One caller would report the temperature in the house was down to 55 degrees. Another caller would report an interior temperature in the 40s. One even swore that the thermostat read in the 30s.

At times, actual alarm bells were going off. One caller, who declined to give his name for publication, had a security system that was setting off an alarm related to potentially freezing water pipes. That alarm set off another type of alarm in his head: Evergy wasn’t completing a planned rolling outage as much as it was failing to complete a rolling outage.

Now, nearly two weeks removed from the rolling blackouts, state regulators and utility watchdogs aren’t yet having the same sort of alarm bells go off in their heads. They aren’t ready to point a finger at Evergy or any other major utility that implemented the blackouts. But they do want to investigate why the process didn’t go more smoothly.

“I’m not trying to assert that utilities were at fault in any manner,” said David Nickel, consumer counsel for the Citizens Utility Ratepayer Board, a state organization that serves as an advocate for utility customers. “I don’t know that yet, but there are lessons to learn from this.”

100 times higher

Tunes might change and pointing fingers might stiffen in the coming days. Sometime soon, customers will start receiving utility bills for the February period. News out of Texas, where blackouts and power problems were more severe, have included reports of unsuspecting homeowners getting bills of $10,000 or more.

There’s some reason to believe that Kansas consumers won’t receive that big of a shock, Nickel and others said. Kansas is a more regulated state when it comes to utilities than Texas. But of the approximately half-dozen energy experts contacted for this article, none was willing to rule out significant costs eventually landing with Kansas customers.

“This is going to cause sticker shock for some folks,” said Lawrence resident Joe Harkins, who is a former KCC commissioner and former director of the energy office for the KCC.

If Kansans do receive a shock, it will be because natural gas prices soared briefly during the electric grid crisis. French said information received by the KCC indicated natural gas was selling for about $300 per unit at the peak of the crisis. That’s up from about $3 per unit in normal times.

Evergy and other power providers in the state do use natural gas to produce electricity. People who heat their homes with natural gas also could be at risk of higher bills because of the spike in fuel costs. That could be a developing story in the next few days. Some publicly traded natural gas providers have made financial filings that indicate they spent $2 billion or more in a three-day period buying natural gas during the height of the crisis. Those costs are several magnitudes higher than normal.

How great the risk is in Kansas, though, isn’t yet known. That’s because utilities haven’t yet disclosed how much of the high-priced natural gas they had to buy to meet Kansas’ needs. French explained that many of the largest utilities had natural gas in storage, or had signed long-term price contracts that might insulate them from the sudden spikes in prices.

“But they had to purchase some gas at those high prices,” French said.

How much they purchased will go a long way in determining how big of a shock consumers might see. Kansas law allows utilities to pass higher fuel costs along to consumers. Gina Penzig, a spokeswoman for Evergy, said the company was working on calculating its fuel costs and several others related to the power grid crisis.

“There are going to be cost increases, though, no doubt about it,” Nickel said.

French said the KCC has taken early steps to lessen the blow of any future increases. The biggest one is an order that requires the utility companies to list all those costs associated with the crisis. Regulators will have to approve those costs as reasonable, and then the KCC can also order the utilities to recover those costs over many months instead of all at once.

“We don’t want it to be that next month people will be hit with a bill that is really high,” French said. “As regulators, we are working to spread those costs out.”

How successful those efforts will be, and for how long, is still an open question.

“I’m going to wait and see what my next bill looks like before I say anything,” Harkins said.

Seeking improvement

There are headaches caused by high utility bills, and then there are shivers caused by a home without heat for hours. Energy experts are saying that some questions need to be answered about why some homes were without electricity for so long during the blackouts.

Officials within Evergy — the large utility that was formed by the combination of Topeka-based Westar and Kansas City-based KCP&L — are among those that will be looking for answers.

“To have some of those (outages) last longer than expected; we don’t want to find ourselves in a position like that again,” Penzig said. “We will be looking for better ways to manage that process.”

Penzig said there were a couple of factors that led to the longer-than-expected blackouts. One was that when company officials went to turn some electric circuits back on, they did not come online like they were supposed to. Poor weather conditions caused some of those malfunctions. Penzig said current data indicated that of the 450 circuits that were interrupted — each circuit controls power for large areas — about 40 of them experienced a malfunction when the company tried to turn them back on. Customers in those areas were without power longer than expected as a result.

The other reason for longer-than-expected outages is that Evergy made a decision to extend the outages. That is because the operator of the regional power grid — an organization called the Southwest Power Pool — was requiring greater conservation of energy to protect the grid than what had originally been expected. The increased demands for energy conservation came with very little advance warning, which made it difficult for Evergy to comply with the demands without lengthening the outage period for some customers.

But when temperatures are below freezing, should there be a limit to how long any one customer is expected to go without power as part of a planned outage?

“I think the answer to that question is yes,” said David Springe, executive director of the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates. “What we are finding is that this is probably an area that hasn’t been focused on enough and hasn’t been stress tested enough.”

Rolling blackouts, after all, aren’t a frequent event. It isn’t entirely clear when they last happened in Kansas, but it has been at least 40 years, industry officials have said.

But regulators aren’t yet ready to say that Evergy or other utilities dropped the ball on how they implemented these rolling blackouts. French said the KCC wanted to gather more information.

“Why was power taken down, and why was it down so long? Those absolutely are issues we should look at as part of an investigation,” French said. “We need to make sure it was done in the most just, reasonable and nondiscriminatory fashion.”

Harkins, the former KCC regulator, said a review might find that there wasn’t much more that Evergy or other Kansas electric utilities could have done differently. He said the public generally does not understand how complex problems with the power grid can be. Harkins said he was grateful for how Kansas utilities kept the lights on. He has family members in Texas who weren’t nearly as fortunate, he said.

“It would be an error to jump to a conclusion that Evergy didn’t do a good job,” Harkins said. “They were dealing with a tough situation.”

It also would be an error to assume that Evergy or any other single utility can implement all of the needed solutions on its own. French, for instance, said there needed to be national discussions about power sharing between regional grids. Springe said there were some serious questions that national leaders also needed to address related to whether power grids were using proper data and assumptions to model for crisis situations. Penzig, the Evergy spokeswoman, said she was confident the industry was going to have those conversations.

“There will be a lot of examination of the circumstances that led to emergency interruptions,” Penzig said. “While there is not a new plan in place just yet, there is a lot of analysis and discussion underway.”

Springe is less confident that all that planning will produce the desired results. He noted that Texas experienced a power grid crisis in 2011, again sparked by a cold snap. Media reports from the time said blackouts lasted up to eight hours in some cases. Much study was done, but many of the same issues repeated themselves, except on a grander scale, this year.

“How many times do they have to hit you with a board before you decide you need to do better?” Springe said.

Springe and Nickel said it was reasonable for utility consumers to expect more notice of rolling blackouts and more reliable expectations of how long they will last.

“There should be a process that is a little more fair and a little less onerous,” Springe said.

If such a process can’t be created, there need to be discussions about what ramifications utility companies should face. While the topic is a complex one, Springe said one thing is clear: Consumers didn’t cause this problem.

“At the end of the day, no consumer who had their lights shut off failed to deliver power to the grid,” he said.