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March Windstorm Event

We understand how difficult it is to be without power, and we appreciate your patience. Crews continued to make steady progress overnight. Small pockets of customers remain without power in King County, Greenwater, and Skykomish. The plan for today is to continue to assess damage in difficult access areas and restore power as quickly and safely as possible.

Below are updates and current estimated restoration times for hard-hit areas:

  • In Skykomish, crews continue to work on the electric system that feeds the town from the west. An additional helicopter patrol is scheduled for later in the morning. We expect to have power restored to our Skykomish customers by today, March 15 at 8 p.m.
  • In King County, crews continue to repair damage to the system throughout the morning. We still expect most customers will have their power restored by today, March 15 at 8 p.m.
  • In Greenwater, Highway 410 remains closed and the combination of deep snow and many fallen trees is preventing crews and equipment from accessing damaged electric equipment. Based on current conditions, restoration efforts could go into Monday. Estimated times of restoration will be updated in the PSE outage map as we are able to reassess for any improvement to travel and access during today's early daylight.

Estimated restoration times by region are available at pse.com/alerts. As crews are assigned to a repair job, the specific time for that outage will be added to the outage map.

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Safety first. Never touch or go within 35 feet of downed power lines because they might be energized. Call PSE at 1-888-225-5773 or 911 to report problems.

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Distributed automation

Resilient and reliable solutions to reduce outages

Distribution Automation (DA) – often described as a "self-healing grid" – is technology that provides real-time monitoring and control of our distribution circuits to help us detect outages more quickly and address them faster and more effectively. While not all power interruptions can be immediately healed, per se, DA does give us a way to greatly reduce their impact on our system and for customers. It also means PSE can dispatch personnel to an isolated section of the system to minimize their inspection time and locate problems quicker.

How it works

When a power outage occurs in a DA-enabled area, the system can pinpoint the source of the problem, isolate the fault to the smallest section possible, and restore power to un-faulted sections. Given the prevalence of falling limbs and trees throughout our service area, DA offers a tangible, measurable benefit for our customers.

Here's a basic description of the process:

The location of a fault (outage) is determined based on sensors on the electric system. Once detected, DA technology uses a series of "reclosers" to automatically operate switches on both sides of the faulted equipment to isolate it from the rest of the system. This feature also can help electric crews locate the trouble spots more quickly – or even eliminate the need for a physical inspection. After the fault has been isolated, the DA system re-energizes the un-faulted sections using power from neighboring electrical lines.

How we're deploying it

Eventually, DA technology will be utilized broadly across our service area. For now, we're concentrating our installation efforts on circuits that have, historically, suffered the highest number of outages (e.g., Kenmore, Chico, and Fernwood). Since 2016, PSE has completed work on 111 circuits, more than doubling the number of completed projects from year to year. In highly populated, urban areas, we've seen this technology protect our customers from over 200,000 hours of outages.

Not all of our substations are advanced enough to accommodate DA, but we’ve worked as quickly as possible to address this issue and other challenges posed by older infrastructure.