Feb. 18—The Southwest Power Pool lowered its Energy Emergency Alert to level one Wednesday afternoon, but continues to urge power customers to conserve electricity through the duration of the cold spell.

Public Service Company of Oklahoma customers in McAlester and Kiamichi Electric Cooperative Customers in Pittsburg County experienced controlled outages Monday and Tuesday after SPP declared level three emergencies, meaning electricity generating capacity dropped below the available load across the SPP’s 14-state area.

The strain caused SPP to request controlled outages all across the 14-state area.

“This is the first time in SPP’s 80-year history we’ve had to take actions like these,” SPP Chief Operating Officer Lanny Nickell said in a video posted to social media Tuesday. “All utilities across our region share responsibility to enact service interruptions when necessary.”

PSO External Affairs Manager Frank Phillips says the company gets little warning when a controlled outage has to occur.

“Sometimes it’s minutes,” Phillips said. “When it gets to a certain point, then they’ll tell you you’ve got to drop the lower and that’s one of the challenges and that’s one of the reasons we have not been able to give as advanced notice because at some point you may have a group ready, I mean you’re prepared to do it, but then they said we need this load right now and you would go and whatever you had assigned for that amount of load you would reduce that.”

Nickell said SPP does not direct its member utilities to reduce the load at any particular location.

“Each utility follows its own emergency plan to reduce energy use as needs,” said Nickell. “These actions are only taken after all other options have been exhausted.”

Phillips said PSO planned for any future controlled outages to only last a maximum of two hours before going to the next batch of customers and slowly bringing customers affected back online.

According to Phillips, the load on the grid spiked in the morning due to customers waking up and turning up heaters and other elec tronics, which coincides with the times the SPP has issued level 3 emergencies on Monday and Tuesday.

Nickell said the controlled interruptions help SPP protect utilities and their customers from experiencing longer outages “which much greater impact.”

Phillips gave the example of why the controlled outages are like a fuse in a house.

“When we have to do that, it’s almost like a fuse in a home,” said Phillips. “With that fuse, if you think of the whole grid being all the wiring in your home then if at some point if that fuse didn’t stop the problem you could have a significant wiring issue or a fire in your home. That’s kind of the way it is with the grid, if you don’t drop that load in that emergency situation, then you can have widespread damage to the grid that could last significantly longer.”

Phillips said the controlled outage PSO did Monday in McAlester was the first time in his 40 years of service.

He also said he understands that calls for conservation are an inconvenience, but he also said the conservation calls do not mean foregoing the safety of customers and the integrity of homes and water supply.

“We want them to do what they can to help reduce voluntarily through energy conservation, but never to the extent that they would that they would cause harm to their families or homes,” said Phillips.

Along with adjusting thermostats, area power companies are giving the following conservation tips.

Close shades and blinds to reduce the amount of heat lost through windows.

Turn off and unplug nonessential lights and appliances.

Avoid using large appliances (i.e., ovens, washing machines, etc.).

Businesses should minimize the use of electric lighting and electricity-consuming equipment as much as possible.

Large consumers of electricity should consider shutting down or reducing nonessential production processes.

Area natural gas companies are also asking customers to conserve energy by lowering the thermostat to at least 68 degrees and by the temperature setting on hot water heaters.