City Leaders Warned of Potential for Rolling Blackouts in Detroit Lakes and Surrounding Area

DETROIT LAKES (KDLM) – Detroit Lakes City Council members were warned of the possibility of rolling blackouts affecting the city this summer and beyond during Tuesday’s City Council Meeting.

Vernell Roberts, Detroit Lakes Public Utilities (DLPU) General Manager warned that projections of energy shortages during the summer of 2022 have been made by both the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and the Southwest Power Pool (SPP). Summer peak electrical needs are projected to be 124 gigawatts, while projected available generation is only 119 gigawatts.

“If it gets really really hot and a high pressure system comes in and the wind quits blowing, we’re going to have outages,” said Roberts.

Detroit Lakes Public Utilities and city leaders are now working to create a plan to curtail load and manage rolling blackouts in Detroit Lakes if necessary.

Roberts says the problem stems from traditional power plants across the U.S. being retired or taken-out-of-service due to environmental concerns, more quickly than they can be replaced with renewable energy. “We thought this was coming 5,6,7 years down the road – when COVID started, a lot of the load went away, the economic recovery happened faster and at a higher rate than anyone anticipated. A lot of coal plants shut down because they didn’t think they would be needed anymore and the market got caught flat-footed.”

Residents and businesses will likely be asked to voluntarily curtail load when needed, including turning up thermostats a few degrees, closing drapes or blinds during the day, shutting off unnecessary lights and equipment and delaying using appliances until later in the evening.

If rolling blackouts are required, Detroit Lakes Public Utilities will need to reduce energy use by up to 30% at 10% increments. Residents and businesses may be left without power rotating throughout DLPU’s service area on an hourly basis until normal operations can be resumed.

Roberts ensured City leaders on Tuesday that critical care facilities including hospitals and health care facilities will not be impacted. The city’s downtown corridor and commercial industrial customers like BTD, TEAM and Lakeshirts will also likely not be impacted because their processes to ramp down production take so long.

“We’ll try to give as much notice as we can to conserve and curtail and hopefully we can mitigate this and not have outages,” said Roberts.

You can listen to Roberts addressing the Council below.