A rolling blackout is a decision to temporarily cut off power to small areas of the grid for short periods of time, to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the entire electric grid. You’ll remember millions of families lost power in Texas last year when the electric grid failed as more power was being consumed than they could generate. That’s what we want to avoid, and we have a detailed plan to keep that from happening. Here’s what it would look like if that happened at Clark County REMC:
First, REMC will start by switching our headquarters to generator power. We believe that we shouldn’t ask you to do something that we’re not willing to do ourselves. Next, we will ask our large commercial members if they are willing to do the same. One large company running off generators could prevent 200 homes from going without power during an emergency.
If we haven’t saved enough energy from our building and large commercial members, we will turn off the electricity to a small part of our territory, but only for 30 minutes. When that time is up, if the grid still needs us to cut back, we will turn the power back on for the first group, and create an outage for a second group. We will repeat that process until the emergency is over.
If we get to the point where these rolling blackouts occur, we will communicate our plans by email, social media, and text message. So please give us a call and make sure all of your information is up-to-date. We are here to help, no matter what!