Coming together to make it through our extreme weather
Every little effort made a difference
Call it a Polar Vortex, the Bitter Blast, the Great Freeze of 2019 or simply Brutally Cold Conditions. Any of these descriptors is appropriate for the extreme low temperatures coupled with wind chills that were breaking all sorts of historic records in Minnesota and beyond.
Helping our neighbors in brutal conditions
The brutal cold affected Minnesota in a big way, from school and business closings, to neighbors checking on neighbors to see how they were handling the cold. Those extreme conditions also pressed our natural gas delivery systems. We asked our Minnesota natural gas customers to help conserve gas so our system could continue to operate well for our customers across the state.
Many of our customers across Minnesota helped out by dropping their home thermostat settings. We’d like to thank you all for helping us, and your neighbors, through this challenging situation.
The Princeton outage
When Xcel Energy experienced an interruption to our natural gas system Tuesday night, about 150 customers in the Princeton area lost gas service. Our crews were on the scene working as quickly as possible to safely restore service. We provided hotel rooms and electric heaters for customers until their gas service could be safely restored. By Thursday, many folks were headed back to their (heated) homes.
Again – thank you for your patience and understanding during this extreme situation.
We do our best to plan for the unexpected
During this recent extreme winter weather, there were scattered power outages and natural gas demand surged. In preparation, before this event started, we made arrangements to have extra crews and other specialists available, on-call or in the field.
We placed our people, resources and systems in a state of high readiness. Even with all that in place, the help of folks across Minnesota made a big difference in getting us through this extreme weather.
For that, we are grateful to everyone who played a part.