Public Safety Power Shutoffs
PrintNorthern Lights Enacts New Wildfire Safety Program & Tools
In this month’s issue of Ruralite is an article, “The Growing Risk of Wildfires” by Scott Flood on Pages 28-29. I encourage you to read the piece, which offers a perspective on wildfires in North America.
NLI is not immune to the growing risk of wildfire, so we are strengthening our wildfire mitigation measures in 2025. Over the next few months, I will share NLI’s fire defense projects and what you can do as a member to take preventive measures. Wildfire is not just a utility concern. It should be a concern for our members and the communities in which we live, work, and play. We each need to do our part to mitigate risks.
The biggest change to NLI’s mitigation efforts for 2025 is establishing a Public Safety Power Shutoff program. The PSPS program will be enacted only in the most extreme of conditions during high fire danger weather. Given certain weather conditions, NLI may elect to deenergize a power line to prevent a fire from starting. We do not want to be the cause of ignition that damages structures or, more tragically, results in loss of life.
We will continue to implement other measures to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires—including regular line inspections, pole testing, and vegetation clearing—but we cannot completely eliminate the risk through these efforts.
We hope not to have to use a PSPS, but we want you to be prepared in case we do. Should NLI implement a PSPS, we will try to give our affected members as much notice as possible leading up to the event.
Utilities surrounding Northern Lights’ service territory are using PSPS in their fire mitigation plans. These utilities include Avista and Northwestern Energy, along with NLI’s transmission provider, Bonneville Power Administration.
Another major change to our fire mitigation plan is to set our protection devices to more sensitive settings. If an outage does occur during fire season, you may see a longer and larger outage because we will be turning off reclosing on our lines. This means the protection devices will not try to close back into a fault to restore power automatically. You may see your power go on and off several times before staying off or coming back on. Our line crews will need to patrol the entire faulted section of the line to ensure there is no object on the line that will start a fire when reenergized.
The NLI board has reviewed the updated Wildfire Mitigation Plan. We have a public comment period open for members and regional agencies to provide feedback. See meeting details above.
NLI does not take these decisions lightly and has been working with other utilities on best practices. This is an ever-evolving landscape of technologies, effective strategies, and lessons learned. Next month, I will provide information on the tools and technologies we use to help with wildfire mitigation.
Wildfire Mitigation Plan (WMP) Public Meeting
NLI will host a public meeting to present and discuss this plan at 10 a.m. PDT on June 23 at NLI Headquarters, 421 Chevy Street in Sagle, Idaho. To view the plan and submit comments, visit the WMP page.
Northern Lights Engineering & Operations Manager Kristin Mettke is an electrical engineer and has worked in the electric utility industry for most of her career.
