OG&E Prepares Customers Ahead Of Potential Rolling Outages

As cold weather rips across the state energy companies are struggling to keep up with the demand for natural gas.

OG&E is still asking its customers to conserve energy to avoid rolling outages.

“The thing that is driving this is the unprecedented winter weather that is going on across the entire country,” David Kimmel with OG&E said.

If the system overloads again, residents can expect planned power outages every 24-hours. Each outage lasting no more than one hour.

“As we move forward with these planned outages, we will try to notify customers as best we can that something will be happening although we are not sure that we will be able to tell them exactly when and what time they may occur,” Kimmel said.

If this happens, it will be difficult to plan what parts of Oklahoma will be hit and when.

“Our capacity is approximately 6,000 megawatts and we need to shed about 75 megawatts so about 1% of our load,” Kimmel said.  “That will amount to a different set of households depending on where it is across our service territory and it also depends on whether it’s businesses or residential, it won’t necessarily be all residential.”

OG&E is hoping that by Wednesday the threat for rolling outages will be over, in the meantime, residents should prepare.

“Don’t turn on appliances unless you absolutely have to. All of that will make a huge difference. The more we can conserve and the more we can get some of that generation back online the quicker this will pass, and we can get back to normal,” Kimmel said. 

OG&E has identified businesses that use more power than your regular household and is working with them to cut down on usage.