RAPID CITY, SD — Following events which began at around 1pm today, Black Hills Energy, a provider for South Dakota and Wyoming utilities held a conference with members of the press to address the widespread outage which has affected not only individual homes, but hospitals, broadcasters, and traffic flow.
Wes Ashton, Vice President of South Dakota & Wyoming Utilities said “The last time I can recall an event that had a systemwide impact was winter storm Atlas”. Noting that the current system outage has likely unrelated causes, saying that they have taken measures to create more robust infrastructure for customers. At the moment, causes for this are undetermined, however BHE has said that the failure is connected to a third party outside of their system. As of right now, neighboring providers have reported outages reaching as far as western Wyoming, though the full extent of this significant outage is unknown as of the time of writing.
Additionally, Ashton wished to quash rumors of significant damages to extant infrastructure, and rumors that the event may have been caused by significant solar activity. Both are unsubstantiated at the time of writing.
As for when the power will come back widely, Ashton assures utilities customers that the system itself is currently undamaged within the boundaries of Black Hills Energy, and that they are in coordination with neighboring providers to get the situation resolved ASAP. “We are currently in the middle of our restoration process. We do have a good percentage of our customers now back up, though, will continue to rise throughout the evening,” says the Vice President “As stated with the process, we will have more customers. Come on in increments throughout the evening hours, we do believe we’ll have the vast majority of our customers back on during the evening hours”.
Update: As of the time of writing, both Black Hills Energy and Powder River Energy Corporation have confirmed the scope and cause of the incident. According to reports from both, the failure resulted from the disruption of a 500 Kilovolt line near Medicine Bow, Wyoming. A press release by Powder River Energy further stated that “Cascading events rolled toward the PRECorp system and also affected electric providers at Montana-Dakota Utilities, Rocky Mountain Power, Black Hills Energy, Basin Electric, and Gillette City services. At its peak, more than 100,000 services from Casper to Rapid City to Sheridan and the northern edge of Cheyenne were impacted”.
