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The effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s rolling blackouts for temporary energy-load reductions during the holidays will be assessed so that electric suppliers will know how to better handle similar situations in the future, according to Winchester Utilities General Manager George Powell.

Powell updated the Winchester City Council on Jan. 10 about the circumstances surrounding the rolling blackouts which affected area residents with temporary power outages lasting about 15 minutes at several-hour intervals.

He said that when temperatures hit single digits across the TVA’s entire service area, several power plants went down due to various cold-related incidents.

Reports from the TVA said that power companies in nearly every state were dealing with the same thing and didn’t have excess power to sell, so TVA flipped the switch on its plan.

Powell said the TVA experienced electricity demand at 33,425 megawatts on Dec. 23, which the TVA said was the third-highest ever.

However, unlike heat-related consumption patterns, the demand didn’t let up.

Powell said the Dec. 24 peak at 31,756 megawatts was a weekend record. He explained that the consumption was predominantly residential-based because most industries remain idle on weekends.

TVA Public Information Officer Jim Hopson told Knoxville’s News Channel 11 that while the TVA had a plan for the cold that it hoped would avoid the need for blackouts, “the intensity of it as well as some of the additional weather effects such as high winds kind of exceeded what we planned for. … As a result, there were a limited number of facilities that did not operate as we had anticipated.”

Those included coal and gas-fired plants, though Hopson said he didn’t have a specific number to share.

Hopson said that in some cases, high winds damaged external equipment, while in others, pieces of equipment, like cooling water supply pumps, froze up, rendering entire plants inoperable.

“That was not what caused the need to get to this point where we had to ask our local power companies to take action,” Hopson said, though he did say it “was a factor.”

He said the local distributors had their own plans and had autonomy in how they reduced load. They just had to do it.

“Even minimal is regrettable, and we hate having to do it, but it’s necessary for the bigger picture,” Hopson said.

He referred to a Northeast blackout years ago and one in Texas just last year as examples of the havoc that can ensue “if you let this go too far and you unbalance the system.

“Then you’re talking hours without power, even days without.”

Hopson had echoed Powell’s assessment about how similar situations will be handled in the future.

“What did we do to prepare, what are the actions that we took during the event, are there things that we could have done differently, how can we better communicate to local power companies, to the public?” Hopson said, defining questions that need to be addressed. “All of these things are on the table, and we’re going to take a very critical look at ourselves and how we did this.”

Hopson said the TVA plans to collect its data “in a very short period of time” and then present it to the public.

“They’re going to know what we saw in ourselves as well as the corrective actions that we’re going to take in order to ensure that even in such an extraordinary event, we don’t have some of these same challenges again in the future,” he said.

Winchester Councilwoman Barbara Lucas asked Powell how much the electricity demand has increased due to there being more electric-powered vehicles on roadways.

Powell said the percentage at this point is extremely small and was not instrumental in the TVA’s move to have the rolling blackouts. However, he added that the situation will need to be addressed in the future as the number of electric vehicles continues to increase.

Mayor Terry Harrell asked Powell about what measures can be taken to reduce vandalism to electric substations which has recently occurred in other states where transformers have been shot by firearms and damaged, resulting in power outages and expensive repairs.

Powell said Winchester Utilities could consider installing closed-circuit camera equipment at substation areas, but little else could be done to counter such a threat.