Santiago Peak power

[AM909]

Does anyone know anything new about the power failure at Santiago Peak, apparently caused by a traffic collision with a power pole down the hill somewhere? SCE opened the ticket at 0011 on 2023-05-27 and it sat on "Step 1: Outage reported" until today, over 7 days later, when it changed to "Step 2: We are determining the cause". I wonder how many hundreds of gallons of fuel, and thousands of $, per day are being burned by the generators (of those that have them, anyway). SCE claims "Customers impacted: 21", which I guess is their excuse for seemingly ignoring it. Never mind that it's one of the largest comm sites in the world, serving a couple million people.

 

[prcguy]

Does anyone know anything new about the power failure at Santiago Peak, apparently caused by a traffic collision with a power pole down the hill somewhere? SCE opened the ticket at 0011 on 2023-05-27 and it sat on "Step 1: Outage reported" until today, over 7 days later, when it changed to "Step 2: We are determining the cause". I wonder how many hundreds of gallons of fuel, and thousands of $, per day are being burned by the generators (of those that have them, anyway). SCE claims "Customers impacted: 21", which I guess is their excuse for seemingly ignoring it. Never mind that it's one of the largest comm sites in the world, serving a couple million people.

I’m associated with a system that has been off air this week after our batteries ran out. On May 27th SCE reported 21 customers were impacted. Yea right, move the decimal point and that will be closer.

 

[littona]

Add me to that list of users on that site.

Repair Outage​

Unincorporated Area - Orange County
Start Time: 5/27/2023 - 12:11 AM PST
Estimated Restoration: 3:30 PM PST Today <<===---LIES!
Status: In Progress - We are Determining the cause
Step 1: Outage reported.
A field investigator has been alerted and is on route to the outage.
Completed
Step 2: We are Determining the cause.
The field investigator is determining the necessary repairs.
In Progress
Step 3: Repair crew on the way.
A repair crew is on route to begin work.
Not Started
Step 4: Crews are performing repairs.
Repairs are underway. Workers may be outside of the affected area.
Not Started
Step 5: Power restored.
Not Started
Reason for Outage:
Traffic Accident
Customers Impacted: 21
Outage # : 800237161

 

[prcguy]

Add me to that list of users on that site.

Repair Outage​

Unincorporated Area - Orange County
Start Time: 5/27/2023 - 12:11 AM PST
Estimated Restoration: 3:30 PM PST Today <<===---LIES!
Status: In Progress - We are Determining the cause
Step 1: Outage reported.
A field investigator has been alerted and is on route to the outage.
Completed
Step 2: We are Determining the cause.
The field investigator is determining the necessary repairs.
In Progress
Step 3: Repair crew on the way.
A repair crew is on route to begin work.
Not Started
Step 4: Crews are performing repairs.
Repairs are underway. Workers may be outside of the affected area.
Not Started
Step 5: Power restored.
Not Started
Reason for Outage:
Traffic Accident
Customers Impacted: 21
Outage # : 800237161

Most people think SCE stands for Southern California Edison. It’s actually Stupid Costly Electricity. And yes they lie.

 

[marcotor]

Not sure about the others, but I do know one building had a $7800 propane bill this week. But it kinda illustrates the "when all else fails" + dependent on hilltops = fail.

 

[littona]

SCE just updated the estimated restoral date. It's now:
6/5/2023 - 3:30 PM PST

 

[prcguy]

Not sure about the others, but I do know one building had a $7800 propane bill this week. But it kinda illustrates the "when all else fails" + dependent on hilltops = fail.

How big is the generator? Looking at current pricing a 20kW propane generator runs about $200 for 24hr or $1,400/week. How long has this outage been going on?

 

[AM909]

How big is the generator? Looking at current pricing a 20kW propane generator runs about $200 for 24hr or $1,400/week. How long has this outage been going on?

I see numbers like 60kW out there on a couple of sites.

Does that include delivery charge?

It's encouraging that the CRIS system is up (at least the CC).

 

[mmckenna]

New generators are often backordered. I have one going in at a site, 150KW, it's been backordered for a while. Infrastructure mostly went in August 2022. Expecting the genset to finally show up in the next month or two.

 

[AM909]

A local CalTrans project here was delayed about a year, apparently for that reason, as it now sports a new BMF Kohl that's about half the size of a shipping container.

 

[prcguy]

New generators are often backordered. I have one going in at a site, 150KW, it's been backordered for a while. Infrastructure mostly went in August 2022. Expecting the genset to finally show up in the next month or two.

Oh, that’s pretty small. My last gig had two 1MW generators for redundancy and the site outgrew running off just one.

 

[mmckenna]

Oh, that’s pretty small. My last gig had two 1MW generators for redundancy and the site outgrew running off just one.

This is for a small (7KW) FM station, a few 100 watt translators, AT&T/FirstNet, Verizon and Sprint, lights, heat, AC, coffee maker and a bit of headroom.

 

[AM909]

Power may have been restored.

 

[marcotor]

How big is the generator? Looking at current pricing a 20kW propane generator runs about $200 for 24hr or $1,400/week. How long has this outage been going on?

I think a large piece of that bill was delivery. As far as I know, it has been out since early on (Friday) during the holiday weekend.

 

[Teotwaki]

Power was restored at roughly 15:25 when a repeater I look after came alive. AT that time Edison cleared the outage from their page.

 

[Teotwaki]

there are roughly 20 buildings on Santiago so I think Edison counts each building's connection as a "customer" and must have felt no urgency to repair the outage for so few accounts. IIRC, the main power lines run up the s/w side of the mountain and then transition to underground feeds to the buildings. I followed Edison's outage web page that had a cryptic comment about "vehicle damage". From that I would suspect that on the 27th of the holiday weekend some offroading dummy ran into a ground mounted transformer and knocked AC power service down.

 

[techman210]

This is really nothing.

After this winter’s storms some sites in the San Bernardino mountains were without power for two months, and site owners had to pay AQMD fees for excessive generator run times.

At the same time, there was no information on their “outage page”.

 

[Teotwaki]

This is really nothing.

After this winter’s storms some sites in the San Bernardino mountains were without power for two months, and site owners had to pay AQMD fees for excessive generator run times.

At the same time, there was no information on their “outage page”.

AQND should have been waving the fee

 

[xilix]

Our power came back at 16:11 today. Been out since May 27th at 00:29:34.

That was a long outage. I suspect SCE doesn't accurately count the # of customers correctly since most of us don't actually pay the bill - American Tower or whomever the site owner is pays and to SCE, this looks like one customer.

Coincidently, we had a conf call just this week with SCE regarding some issues we had at Mt Wilson.

I'll mention the Santiago issue (does anyone have outage # ?) to our acct rep. I'm not holding out hope it will effective...

 

[mmckenna]

To the utility, a meter is a customer. That's how they run things. The meter is the demarcation point (usually) between them and us.
What happens on the load side of the meter isn't really their business. If you take the load side of the meter and split it off into 10 each 20 amp circuits, each feeding a repeater, they still see the one meter.