Winter Outages

The Northwest is known as a winter wonderland, where beautiful white snow blankets the trees. But with the snow also comes winter power outages. Heavy snow and gusting wind is known to knock out your power.

At Northern Lights, our goal is to restore power safely to the greatest number of members in the shortest amount of time possible. If you do lose power, be sure to report it to the outage line at (866) 665-4837.

During an outage, crews work to restore power in the following order:

  1. Transmission towers and lines
    Transmission lines deliver all the power to Northern Lights members. These lines feed our substations.
  2. Substations
    Once the transmission lines are fixed, crews next check NLI substations to ensure they are undamaged and energized.
  3. Distribution lines
    Distribution lines deliver power from NLI substations throughout our service territory. These lines make up most of our system. This is the slowest part of the restoration process.
  4. Taps
    Taps are the individual lines that run to your property from the distribution lines. These are the last item to be fixed and can often result in you not having power while all of your neighbors do.

During an outage, you can view our outage map at www.nli.coop to get an idea of where the outages are and their size. We always appreciate your patience as our crews work around the clock in all weather conditions to get your power back on as quickly as possible.

We live in a beautiful rural area, and trees cause most of our outages with broken limbs being weighed down and falling over. The NLI Board of Directors has made it a priority to fund tree trimming. This not only helps reduce outages, but fire danger.

Enjoy your last few weeks of winter, as spring is just around the corner!

Annie Terracciano
General Manager