A Canadian gas pipeline exploded causing a fireball on Jan. 26th, which shut down that pipeline and three others. These pipes supply natural gas to Grand Forks, Fargo and West Fargo. The explosion resulted in a gas cutoff in Canada and Xcel Energy contacting their customers to try and conserve their energy usage.
“We may have confused them a little,” North Dakota Principal Manager of Xcel Energy Mark Nisbet said. “We try to have our communication to be precise, but instead of cooling you set your thermostat lower, which will use less natural gas and your house will naturally settle down to that lower temperature.”
While Xcel contacted all customers, they were still pleased with how many people actually participated.
“People can do what they want,” Nisbet said. “It was never mandatory. It was about their own interest in keeping their community and natural gas supply going and if everybody worked together, you were going to have a positive outcome.”
One Xcel customer, junior Yesenia DeLeon, used her freedom and chose not to lower her home temperature for a while.
“We’re usually at 70 degrees, and we had to turn it down to 60 degrees, but my parents said ‘No, we’re going to keep at 65 at least’,” DeLeon said. “They called us the next day and they told us to lower it down even lower to 50 degrees. The whole time it was cold and annoying. We have gas in our house and in our stove, so we couldn’t use that.”
For students who are Xcel customers, they were worried the school may have been cold the next morning. Luckily, the school has dual fuel sources and they merely switched from natural gas to heating oil. This way, the school did not have to lower the temperature or use natural gas.
“When the gas pressures drop off because of the high usage, then they’ve got customers like us, called interruptible, and they call us to notify us to switch over to dual fuel so that we aren’t taking all this gas here and it supplies it for the homes and people like that,” Pete Diemert, Director of Building and Grounds said.
Diemert said that along with this already bad situation, the fact that the weather was almost consistently below zero caused this to be a worst case scenario. Nisbet also noticed the bad circumstances, so Xcel took other measures such as flowing excess gas from the Twin Cities.
“It was a tough situation,” Nisbet said. “What made it even more dramatic is the terrifically cold temperature and the blizzard coming. We did bring extra men and crews to town to help us if we ran into problems, but we the blizzards shut down the state and we wanted to have a few more people at hand.”
While this period of low heating is never wanted, Diemert can also see the silver lining.
“I think it was a good wake-up call for us knowing that our energy supplies are somewhat dependent on weather and other conditions,” Diemert said. “[I]t just shows that everything affects us too. I think we’ve kind of been spoiled by how nice it’s been for us. It’s 20-below zero and I can walk through the school and see people wearing t-shirts.”
Even though people might be “spoiled,” according to Diemert, Nisbet sees a community quick to help out people in need.
“This is a time when the media actually played a big role in getting the message out to people, so we appreciated their help and the end result,” Nisbet said. “The customers got the message, turned down the heat, and we got through a pretty touchy situation with the help of the customers.”