SWEPCO Rolling Blackouts: Where and How Long? [VIDEO]

SWEPCO's Michael Corbin talks about the company's rolling blackouts for the area and the plan to restore power in case of outages from the coming winter storm.

In explaining the regions rolling blackouts, planned power outages for different areas of the ArkLaTex, "We've learned a new word during this winter storm. It's called 'loadshed,' he says, "And loadshed is when the grid operator tells all their participating utilities - which SWEPCO is in our regional grid - that you must shed 'X amount of load,' meaning megawatts. You have to pull off the system for the safety of the grid.

It's unprecedented. We never had to do this before. We cut some circuits for about a hour...that took the stress off the grid. And early this morning we received the order to begin this again."

And Corbin explains the blackout plan. "It did begin again (Tuesday) morning," he says, saying that north and south Bossier circuits were involved, adding that it's difficult have a blackout schedule because they're doing as few as possible. "It's very fluid. As you turn a circuit off, you have to see it's impact. How much (power) you have saved the system and we have a number we have to work toward.

"We're not going to pick on one area multiple times, we have a list of (area) circuits and we'll be working through our list and we'll be working through the list as long as we need."

And what about the length of the outages? "We are told (they) could be two to three hours," Corbin says, stressing that customers should conserve, "(Monday) they didn't last an hour. we were to get enough load off that the grid recovered. We hope we don't go over two hours, but we'll have to see how the day turns out."