Preemptive utilities shutdown oversight: Too much, too little, or just right?

Preventing fires and other calamities by proactively shutting off power in advance of inclement weather is dependent on forecast precision; customers’ needs should also be a considered factor.

Following up on my prior blog post, wherein I detailed my “interesting” mid-November, I’ll now share that mid-December was “interesting” as well, albeit for a different reason.

I’ve mentioned before that my residence in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver, CO, is no stranger to inclement weather. Mid-year monsoon storms are a regular presence, for example, such as a September 2024 example that, like 2014 and 2015 predecessors, zapped various electronic devices, leaving them useful only as teardown patients going forward.

Everyone knows it’s Windy

More generally, it tends to be “breezy” here, both on a sustained and (especially) gusty basis. See for example the multi-day screenshots I snagged as I was preparing to work on this writeup:

That said, mid-December 2025 was especially crazy. On Monday, December 15, Xcel Energy began warning of a potential preparatory outage beginning that same Wednesday, initially affecting approximately a half-million customers but downgraded a day later to roughly 50,000 (including us), along with additional potential outages as conditions both in-advance warranted and ended up being the case, resulting from high wind damage (the affected total that day ended up being 100,000+). Indeed, we ended up losing power, the result of a controlled shutoff beginning late Wednesday morning the 17th, and we also subsequently experienced extremely high winds at our location.

Here’s a screenshot I grabbed right at the initially forecasted 73 mph gust peak that evening:

and another, a couple of hours later, once the intensity had begun to dissipate, indicating that the actual peak gust at my location had been 85 mph:

Thursday the 18th was comparatively calm, and our residence power was briefly restored starting at 5:30 that evening. Early the next morning, however, the electricity went down again due to another Xcel Energy-initiated controlled shutoff, in advance of another extremely high-winds day. We got our power back to stay on Saturday evening the 20th at around 5 pm. That said, Xcel’s service to the affected region wasn’t fully restored until well into the following week.

Legal and fiscal precedent

Here’s some historical background on why Xcel Energy might have made this preparatory shutoff decision, and to this degree. On December 30, 2021, a grass fire in Boulder County, Colorado (north of me), later referred to as the Marshall Fire, started and was subsequently fueled by 115 mph peak wind gusts:

The fire caused the evacuation of 37,500 people, killed two people, and destroyed more than 1,000 structures to become the most destructive fire in Colorado history.

Xcel Energy was later assigned responsibility for one of the fire’s two root causes, although Wikipedia’s entry points out that it “was neither caused by criminal negligence nor arson.”

In June 2023, Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson announced that the fire’s causes had been found. He said that the fire was caused by two separate occurrences: “week-old embers on Twelve Tribes property and a sparking Xcel Energy power line.”

Wikipedia goes on to note that “Xcel Energy has faced more than 200 lawsuits filed by victims of the fire.” Those lawsuits were settled en masse two-plus years later, and less than three months ahead of the subsequent wind-related incident I’m documenting today:

On September 24, 2025, just ahead of trial, the parties reached a settlement. Pursuant to the agreement, Xcel will pay $640 million without admitting liability for the Marshall Fire. The settlement, which also includes Qwest Corp. and Teleport Communications America, resolves claims brought by individual plaintiffs, insurance companies, and public entities impacted by the fire. The resolution avoids what was anticipated to be a lengthy trial. No additional details regarding the settlement have been disclosed at this time.

A providential outcome (for us, at least)

The prolonged outage, I’m thankful to say, only modestly affected my wife and me. We stuck it out at the house through Wednesday night, but given that the high winds precluded us from using our fireplaces as an alternative heart source (high winds also precluded the use of solar cell banks to recharge our various EcoFlow portable power setups, a topic which I’ll explore in detail in a subsequent post), we ended up dropping off our dog at a nearby kennel and heading “down the hill” the next (Thursday) morning to a still-powered hotel room for a few days:

Thanks in no small part to the few-hour electric power restoration overnight on Thursday, plus the cold outside temperatures, we ended up only needing to toss the contents of our kitchen refrigerator. The food in its freezer, plus that in both the refrigerator/freezer and standalone chest freezer in the garage, all survived. And both the house and its contents more generally made it through the multiple days of high winds largely unscathed.

Likely unsurprising to you, the public outcry at Xcel Energy’s shutoff decision, including but not limited to its extent and duration, has been heated. Some of it—demanding that the utility immediately bury all of its power lines, and at no cost to customers—is IMHO fundamentally, albeit understandably (we can’t all be power grid engineers, after all) ignorant. See, for example, my recent photograph of a few of the numerous high voltage lines spanning the hills above Golden:

There’s also grousing about the supposed inflated salaries of various Xcel Energy executives, for example, along with the as-usual broader complaints about Xcel Energt and other regulated monopolies.

That all said, I realize that other residents had it much worse off than us; they weren’t able to, and/or couldn’t afford to, relocate to a warm, electrified hotel room as we did, for example. Their outage(s) may have lasted longer than ours. They might have needed to throw out and replace more (and maybe all) of their refrigerated and frozen food (the same goes for grocery stores, restaurants, and the like). And their homes, businesses, and other possessions might have been damaged and/or destroyed by the high winds as well. All of it fueling frustration.

Results-rationalized actions?

But that all said, at the end of the day I haven’t heard of any fires resulting from the mid-December high winds, or for that matter the more recent ones primarily in the eastern half of the state and elsewhere (the two screenshots I shared at the beginning of this writeup showed the more modest effects at my particular location) that prompted another proactive shutdown. And of course, weather forecasting is an inexact science at best, so Xcel Energy’s conservative potential over-estimation of how large a region to shut down and for how long may at least somewhat understandable, particularly in light of the recent sizeable settlement it just paid out.

In closing, I’m curious to hear what you think. Was Xcel Energy too pessimistic with its decisions and actions? Or maybe too optimistic? And is there anything it could do better and/or more to both in-advance predict and in-the-moment react to conditions in the air and on the ground, as well as to repair and revive service afterwards?

To wit, while I intended the word “oversight” in this write-up’s title to reference the following definition option:

  • Supervision; watchful care.

I realized in looking up the word that two other definition options are also ironically listed:

  • An omission or error due to carelessness.
  • Unintentional failure to notice or consider; lack of proper attention.

Which one(s) apply in this case? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Principal at Sierra Media and a former technical editor at EDN Magazine, where he still regularly contributes as a freelancer.

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