LMUD announcement of islanding agreement with Honey Lake Power sets Facebook buzzing
Holy electrons, Batman!
A Lassen Municipal Utility District notice on its Facebook page advising the community that due to scheduled maintenance work by Pacific Gas and Electric on the Caribou transmission line (the line that delivers power to LMUD), the publicly owned utility district will be receiving power from Honey Lake Power from June 6 until June 14 raised concern among some members of the public.
Here’s the LMUD Facebook post that launched the whole shebang.Lassen News called Theresa Phillips, LMUD’s public relations specialist to inquire about those concerns.
It’s just another day of business as usual at LMUD.
“This has been talked about months in advance,” Phillips said. “It’s been planned and prepared for … A lot of times we go on the Honey Lake island and we never even say a word about it, but with what happened last time back in March when we went on the island on March 31 and then April 1 LHP had a catastrophic equipment failure — the community was in an uproar because we didn’t tell them we were planning this islanding event.”
Phillips said management discussed the matter and decided in the interests of transparency, it would notify the public this time. And now there’s all this.
“It’s a double-edged sword because if we didn’t say something and something went wrong, people are upset,” Phillips said. “We say something, and people are upset. So, what do we do in the best interest of our customers and following our core value of transparency? I decided, let’s let everybody know.”
She also said LMUD’s source of power changed from PG&E to HLP several hours before the Facebook post went up and nobody noticed.
Phillips said LMUD has little to say about decisions PG&E makes regarding maintenance work on the Caribou line, but since LMUD power travels over that line, its reliability is important to LMUD customers. She said LMUD customers benefit from increased reliability on the Caribou line.
Power generated at HLP is more expensive (HLP uses wood chips to power a boiler to spin a turbine to generate power) than power supplied by PG&E
In any case, should HLP have an issue, Phillips said arrangements have been made to bring PG&E power in on another line, although that process is not ideal.
“We don’t know what the future holds,” Phillips said, “but we know we are prepared.”
For more information or if you have questions or concerns, call LMUD at (530) 257-4174.
