Despite the scorching summer temperatures in the Coachella Valley, Southern California Edison continues to perform scheduled power outages. Every summer costumers ask the same question. Why?!
It happened again just last week. KMIR showed you dozens of customers in Desert Hot Springs sweltering on a triple digit day when Edison cut their power for scheduled maintenance.
Every time this happens KMIR get some pretty nasty comments about Edison. We also get questions. A lot of questions. So today with your questions in hand, KMIR’s Vince Marino went to Edison to get some answers.
The most common question is, why? Why does Edison conduct power outages in the middle of summer?
“There is too much work for it to only be done during the cooler season.”
“We would much rather do that than have a piece of equipment fail and then put our customers in the dark for a much longer period of time,” said Tomaso Gianelli, senior manager for Southern California Edison’s outage communications team.
Question number two: Why doesn’t Edison restrict power outages to winter and fall only?
“There is too much work for it to only be done during the cooler season,” said Giannelli
Question number three: How hot does it have to be for before Edison says, ‘Okay, maybe we shouldn’t turn off customers’ air conditioning?’
“it’s going to be around 113-degree heat index or temperature. Whatever is reached quicker and then we would cancel all non-critical outages,” Gianelli said.
Question four: Why do we only get a one week notice?
“That 7 to 11 day time frame is really the best to give our customers as much advanced notice as possible and limit the opportunity for other priority work to come in,” said Giannelli.
Question number five: Who is next on the outage list? For security reasons, Edison could not tell us. But they did say that so far this year there have been 300 scheduled power outages. They estimate there could be as many as four hundred more.
