KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As the threat of an electrical power shortage waned Monday evening, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas asked that the city’s downtown skyline go dark Monday night to conserve electricity.
“As part of Kansas City’s commitment to conserving electricity for our residents, we are actively communicating with our downtown partners and have requested that the downtown skyline go dark tonight,” Lucas said on Twitter. “City Hall will also turn off all exterior lights.”
The announcement came as the need for the rolling power outages subsided Monday afternoon and the power grid emergency was canceled by Southwest Power Pool Inc., which manages the electrical grid across 17 central and western states, including in the Kansas City area.
“The grid operator now has enough generation available to meet demand throughout its service territory and to fully meet its minimum reserve requirements,” Southwest Power Pool said in a news release posted on social media.
Southwest Power Pool, however, said that due to the high demand for electricity and the record cold temperatures, it is likely that it “may have to direct further interruptions of service if available generation is inadequate to meet the high demand.”
Southwest Power Pool issued the power grid emergency shortly after noon Monday when the power being generated fell short of demand. In response, it asked its member utilities to implement rolling power outages to curtail electrical use.
As a result, thousands of electrical customers throughout Kansas City and Independence, Missouri, experienced rolling service outages on Monday afternoon as the result of extreme cold weather conditions that have created a high demand for electricity.
Individual customers of Independence Power & Light were without electrical service for about 30 minutes. The service disruptions would affect about 2,000 customers at a time, said Meg Lewis, spokeswoman with the city of Independence.
The Kansas City, Kansas, Board of Public Utilities said it too began rolling blackouts to blocks of its customers, which lasted about 40 minutes, the utility said in a press release.
Evergy asked customers to conserve electricity use “as much as possible” until Wednesday to avoid possible power outages. In a press release on Sunday, the company said the region experiencing the “coldest weather in decades” made electricity shortages possible.
On Monday, Evergy began to turn off electricity to blocks of customers for up to 60 minutes. Once the period has concluded, electrical service power would be restored to the impacted areas, the company said in a press release.
The company said on Twitter that roughly 60,000 customers were without power for some 30 minutes.
“The emergency outages will then rotate to another portion of Evergy’s service area. Power will cycle off and on periodically until the reduction is no longer required by the SPP. With these extreme cold temperatures, equipment may not operate as intended. As a result, outages could last longer than 30 — 60 minutes,” according to the press release.
Southwest Power Pool urged customers to conserve electricity at home and work and to follow their local utility’s directions regarding safety, conservation and potential outages.
A wind chill warning is in place until noon today with wind chills ranging from minus-25 to minus-35 degrees.
