We want to take time to answer questions about events from recent days.
How do you decide which areas will have the emergency outages?
Why can’t you notify people in advance of the emergency outage?
How come the outages last longer than what you said they would? 1/

Q1: How do you decide which areas will have the emergency outages? A1: Evergy uses system data to generate a list of the areas we should power off to best balance the current stress on the grid. 2/

The process spreads outages across our entire service territory, which includes eastern Kansas & western Missouri, including the Kansas City metro area. Our analysts then review the designated areas and remove hospitals & other emergency facilities so they don’t lose power. 3/

Q2: Why can’t you notify people in advance of the emergency outage? A2: The power supply needs can change rapidly and are impacted by events across several multi-state regions. It’s not possible to notify customers in advance. 4/

In some cases, we’ve had as little as 10 mins from the time we learn an outage is required and implemented. With so many variables, conditions can change rapidly and customers might end up with inaccurate information. 5/

Q3: How come the outages last longer than what you said they would? A3: Most of our emergency outages on the first day last around 30 minutes. The second day, most of our outages lasted at or a little more than two hours. 6/

On Day 2, we were asked to reduce a much larger amount of power, which resulted in customers being impacted for longer times. The biggest issue has been with breakers in our substations that control the power flow not coming back on after the outage. 7/

Think about the breaker box in your house. The main breaker in your house is akin to a substation breaker and the smaller breakers in your panel are like the manual switches we open on the grid. Perhaps at some point you’ve tripped a breaker and have to turn it back on. 8/

This is the same concept, but on a giant level & instead of all those switches being in a row on your breaker panel, they’re miles down the road. So, for the house analogy, the main breaker panel powers the whole house. The little ones carry say kitchen, dining room, bedroom. 9/

If all your lights are on in your kitchen, dining room &bedroom, the main breaker may over load if we try to have electricity flowing to the whole house at one time. 10/

So we open the switches for the kitchen, dining room & bedroom to reduce the amount of load on the main breaker when we close it. 11/

At the power grid level, the electricity load usually flows through the breaker at various levels throughout the day, so changes to the breaker aren’t significant at any one time. 12/

If you shut it off, though, and then bring it back on, you’re bringing back on the maximum load for that breaker and it trips the main breaker, thinking it is overloaded, just like what would happen in your house. 13/

Add to that the fact that equipment is more brittle when it is this cold and sometimes they just don’t work and won’t come back on. 14/

In your house, you would just have to go to your breaker box and flip the switch. In this case, it takes a more time because we have to dispatch a crew out to where the breaker is physically located. Main breakers we handle remotely most of the time. 15/

To get these main breakers back on, we must reroute power to different circuits – like the smaller switches in your breaker box – and those smaller breakers have to be closed manually one at a time to bring the load back on more slowly to avoid overloading the main circuit. 16/

Those manual closes require Evergy workers to go to the affected substations and work their way through the breakers. 17/

We know that doesn’t make an extended power outage any less inconvenient, but hope that walking through the issue at least gives a better understanding of why it’s takes a while to get power restored. end/