Homer Electric Association announced that they will be working in Soldotna this summer on a project designed to improve the reliability and extend the life of underground cable. Some of HEA’s underground electrical cables are aging, which means that their protective insulation is beginning to deteriorate. This can cause cracks which can lead to unplanned power outages.
Keriann Baker, Director of Member Relations for HEA spoke to KSRM saying to expect some planned power outages, “More than likely, and what our plan is, is to let people know ahead of time. We have a whole system for planned outages. When we know what areas are going to be offline, we usually let people know ahead of time and we call them, we put it up on our website. We also have an outage map that a lot of people don’t know about. It’s pretty up to date and we have been working a lot with operations and engineering to get their system to work with this outage map so that if you go online to this outage map it should show you in real time where the outage is. So if it’s unplanned, you’ll be able to go on, and if it’s on our outage map, we are aware of it, we know it’s happened. Our plan in this case because we’re making repairs and we’ve got a schedule, is we would not only would it reflect on that outage map in real time, but before the problem occurs, we intend to let those effected members know. Then, of course, on the backend if something goes unplanned, you’ll see it in real time on our outage map.”
Homer Electric has been using cable injection technologies over the past several years to repair the cables using a silicone injection process. The silicone fills the cracks in the cables and extends the useful life of the cable. Cable injection work has begun on K-Beach Road from Bridge Access Road to Soldotna.
The number of power interruptions will be kept to a minimum and HEA will make every effort to limit the duration of the outages.