CNMEC Plans Power Outage in Corona Despite Impending Winter Storm
Central New Mexico Electric Cooperative (CNMEC) plans to proceed with a scheduled power outage affecting the Corona area on Friday from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, despite an impending winter storm expected to bring snow and colder temperatures to the region.
The outage, which CNMEC officials say has been in planning for more than a month, will involve coordination between CNMEC and its power provider, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association. According to Sheldon Roberts, CNMEC’s operations manager, the outage is necessary to perform work involving a mobile substation currently serving the area.
“We have been monitoring that storm,” Roberts said. “We’ve actually looked at trying to reschedule this outage. It’s been in the works for over a month, and multiple entities that are coming together to do this work. And so just the way everybody’s schedules and everything, we are going to go ahead and proceed with having that outage from 2:00 to 4:00 on Friday.”
“We’ve got multiple crews coming in, trying to shorten that outage down as much as we possibly can to get people’s power restored quickly and safely,” he said.
When asked whether CNMEC was aware of residents in the affected area who may have health concerns that could be impacted by the outage, Roberts said he had not personally received any such notifications.
“We’ve tried to put the word out so that people could kind of make plans,” Roberts said. “Personally, I haven’t had anybody reach out to me. If our dispatch has, I try to get with them to see about that.”
Roberts also confirmed that CNMEC will not be providing a warming station or similar facility during the outage, despite the expected winter weather.
“We are not going to have that, no, sir,” Roberts said. “We originally set [the planned outage] from 2:00 to 4:00, [because that time was] kind of the warmer part of the day. With the storm, obviously, that’s kind of changed things up. But still, we’re hoping with only having that at a two-hour outage, if people have their homes warm and stuff before that outage, that it hopefully will not get too cold on them before we get power restored and get heaters going back up.”
Roberts did not address what could be the impact if the power outage lasted longer than two hours.
Roberts said the timing of the outage reflects the challenges of scheduling work during winter months.
“This time of year is tough no matter what,” he said. “If we postpone it a week, we could end up in same conditions, worse conditions. Because when originally I planned this, it looked like we were going to be good.”
In addition to the planned outage, Roberts said CNMEC is preparing to replace the existing Corona substation with a new facility.
“We haven’t broke ground on the new substation, but we are building a brand new substation there in Corona to replace this one,” Roberts said. “We’re hoping to start that project early spring and have that completed by late summer and have that new substation in place before next winter.”
The new substation is expected to improve both capacity and reliability in the area.
“The biggest thing is we’re increasing our capacity with a larger transformer,” Roberts said. “And we’re also hoping to increase our reliability as well with just all the newer equipment.”