LOCAL NEWS
A14 • HERMISTONHERALD.COM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2019
Keeping the lights on: Hermiston utilities test new ways to reduce outages
By JADE MCDOWELL
NEWS EDITOR
N
o one likes it when
their power goes out.
Hermiston
Energy Services and Uma-
tilla Electric Cooperative are
working to keep their cus-
tomers from experiencing
that frustrating phenomenon
any more often than neces-
sary. But they are also trying
to move through improve-
ments at a pace that allows
them to keep rates well
below the national and state
average.
“There’s reliability and
there’s affordability, and
we try to strike a balance
there,” HES general man-
ager Nate Rivera said.
The municipal utility
recently completed a pilot
project for moving trans-
formers off poles in order to
reduce outages. They chose
to test the project on 24
homes in the East Pine Ave-
nue neighborhood, which
had multiple transform-
ers on poles in back yards,
with primary lines running
through “mature” trees.
“When we have wind-
storms, we would have
branches land on lines,”
Rivera said.
Now those primary lines
are underground, and the
transformers are in boxes
in front yards instead of on
poles behind private fences.
Homes are still served indi-
vidually with low-voltage
lines above ground, but the
lines that can knock out
power to large swaths of
the city, instead of a sin-
gle house, are buried safely
below.
Rivera said not only does
the move make the area less
vulnerable to outages, but
when one does happen, par-
ticularly during the middle
of the night, it will be eas-
ier for crews to access what
they need from the street.
“We’re not having to
carry poles through gates
and pull wire over fences,”
Staff photo by Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Ricky Parsons, left, and Andy Renoe work to load tree trimmings into a chipper after trimming
a tree to avoid a set of power lines off of Agnew Road in Hermiston. Parsons and Renoe
are employees of The Tree Service, a company contracted to trim trees for Umatilla Electric
Cooperative.
Staff photo by Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Umatilla Electric Cooperative has been trimming trees away
from power lines in an eff ort to decrease outages.
he said.
They are taking advan-
tage of new boring methods
that allow them to thread
wire through underground
PVC pipe from one spot,
instead of digging a trench
all along where the new
wires are going. Encasing
the wire in pipe instead of
laying it directly in the bare
dirt, as utilities used to do,
helps crews avoid having to
dig up yards to service the
lines.
Rivera said the test
area’s size kept costs down
while still providing a large
enough sample size for HES
to learn and improve.
HES has scheduled cap-
ital projects into 2021, but
Rivera said after that they
would likely start schedul-
ing some additional neigh-
borhoods to convert. He said
it would be great to move
large numbers of neighbor-
hoods at once to the more
reliable underground setup,
but that would take addi-
tional revenue and HES is
“sensitive” to the concerns
right now in Hermiston
about the cost of utilities.
In the meantime, HES
and Umatilla Electric Coop-
erative try to protect above-
ground power lines and
transformers in part with
tree-trimming. Rivera said
HES has a cycle of trim-
ming trees near power lines
every three years.
He said they educate
homeowners about planting
trees away from poles and
lines, and talk to local nurs-
eries and stores like Home
Depot about teaching peo-
ple to understand the growth
pattern their new tree will
follow.
For homeowners who
are willing to remove trees
that electric crews must trim
every three years, HES pro-
vides vouchers to plant a
new tree on a safer part of
the property.
Umatilla Electric Cooperative
UEC is contracted to han-
dle tree-trimming and other
maintenance for HES, in
addition to serving its own
customers. UEC spokes-
person Steve Meyers said
in the past two years UEC
has trimmed or removed
more than 22,000 trees near
power lines. He said the
company inspects all power
lines in its 1,930-square-
mile service territory during
their three-year rotation.
“Because the cause of
many outages is beyond our
control — a severe storm or
a vehicle that skids into a
power pole — we can’t say
we can eliminate all outages
struction starts near the
intersection of Highway
395 and Highway 730, run-
ning south along Lind and
Geer roads. UEC began put-
ting up the large steel poles
in July, and has estimated
the project will take about
six months.
Like many of UEC’s cap-
ital projects, including the
new feeder lines and sub-
station, the transmission
line is a UEC project but
serves both UEC and HES
customers.
New “smart” meters
installed in recent years has
allowed the utility to know
automatically when an out-
age occurs instead of rely-
ing on customers to call it
in. UEC is installing a new
Supervisory Control and
Data Acquisition (SCADA)
system, and Meyers said
getting data faster and
more accurately “is essen-
tial in quickly diagnosing
the cause of an outage and
putting our response into
action.”
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all the time,” Meyers said in
an email. “But we are work-
ing toward shortening their
duration.”
Until recently, there were
only three feeder lines serv-
ing the city, which meant an
errant branch could knock
out power to a third of the
city. Since the new Hermis-
ton East substation opened
in December 2017 there
are now six feeder lines,
shrinking some outages in
half. The substation itself
has also helped by provid-
ing extra capacity where
UEC can transfer customers
during an outage, restoring
their electricity sooner.
Now UEC is working to
build a McNary to Herm-
iston Butte transmission
line, which will also create
redundancies by adding a
second source of power to
Hermiston so that the entire
town doesn’t lose power
when something happens to
the city’s current transmis-
sion line.
The new line under con-
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