July 26th Power Outage Statement

July 26th outage:

At approximately noon today Baldwin experienced a complete outage for our customers. Apparently, Evergy had a pole break east of Baldwin on the line that we normally receive our power from. Because it also took out their communications of the circuit, they did not realize that Baldwin was experiencing an outage at first. Evergy was also unable to remotely switch Baldwin to the backup feed.

While Evergy crews were enroute to manually switch our feeds, Baldwin crews attempted to restore power to the town using our own generation. Two attempts were made to restore all of the circuits in town, but some of the circuits were just too large from the extreme heat of the day, and both times the units tripped offline because of the heavily loaded circuits we were trying to restore. Since Evergy was onsite by this time, the decision was made to give them the short time that it took to manually switch the feeds. The only other option we had was to have our linecrew separate some to the circuits throughout the town so that we could safely pick up smaller loads that our generators could handle. This procedure would have taken more time than allowing Evergy to get their manual switching completed.

One thing to note while on the subject, it would be helpful if customers were able to turn off their large usage items such as air conditioning and electric heaters during an outage. All of those items coming on at the same time when power is being restored is sometimes too great of a load. If we are trying to restore power with our generation, on days like today, it can be too much for them to pick up. Then, after power is restored, these items can be turned back on at different intervals. Sometimes, small things like this can help.

The scenario that happened today is one of the reasons that the city is currently building a second substation. Had this second substation been in service today, we would have more options on controlling the size of each of the circuits and would have be able to restore power quicker using our own generation. We hope to have our second substation in service by late 2026. I believe there will be updates to this project as it progresses.

Even though today was a warm day to be without power, we appreciate your patience while we worked through the process of restoring all of the circuits.

I would also like to thank the on-call City and Evergy crews who responded to the outage.

Jeff Winker

Power Plant Superintendent