BOULDER, Colo. — Xcel shut off power to 55,000 customers for the first time in Colorado in April. That has more people in Denver considering other energy sources.
Independent Power in Boulder says they’ve received about five times as many calls as they normally would after the big wind storm on April 6.
“When we got the text from Xcel that power was going out in three hours, my family freaked out and said, what are we going to do?” Kyle Garner said. “And I said ‘well we don’t have to do anything, because we are going to have power the whole time,' and we did.”
Garner is thankful for his decision to install batteries a few months ago. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but they kept his family pretty mostly undisturbed while the rest of block went dark.
“Never lost power in the 26 hours that the neighborhood was off,” Garner said. “We had everything up and running. We never lost you know, our refrigerator, we didn’t lose any groceries, all the other stuff that people were talking about.”
He didn’t have to lift a finger to turn it on, but he can watch it hard at work at his fingertips through an app on his phone.
Independent Power in Boulder has been slammed with phone calls the last two weeks as people wonder when Xcel could shut off power in Colorado again, like they do regularly in other states.
“People call us and say ‘yeah that was the turning point with Marshall Fire and these weather situations, we are going to see this more often, so what can I do to prepare myself for the next event?” Luke Simmons with Independent Power said.
A big question people want to know about these batteries is if they can keep medical devices up and running.
“Part of our process is to ask the homeowner what they want to have backup power for,” Simmons said. “And then we size the battery accordingly so medical devices, important things, we would take into consideration.”
The batteries are the same as electric car batteries.
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