MOORHEAD (KFGO) – Moorhead’s rolling blackouts are finished for now.
Moorhead Public Service General Manager Travis Schmidt said the rolling blackout was an order from their system operator, Southwest Power Pool, and they got less than 30-minute notice to prepare.
The Southwest Power Pool said a strain on the electric grid was brought on by a huge demand for power in other parts of the country experiencing severe cold and required 30-minute rolling blackouts on the system. Southwest Power Pool says they have things under control and are uncertain if another rolling outage will happen. If another outage follows, it will be on the northeast side of Moorhead. Schmidt said, “It was something out of our control, and it happened so fast we couldn’t alert everyone before it happened.”
The shutdown affected the south and west portions of Moorhead and around 5,000 customers lost power.