After another five-hour electrical outage for Kingfisher residents and businesses on Saturday, City Manager Dave Slezickey is pushing for a meeting with both the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority and OG&E to find a solution.

The nearly day-long event included both total outages and “brown outs,” with power coming in at insufficient voltage to power appliances and electronics.

Residents expressed their frustration in online posts, calls to city administrators and even to their state representatives.

“I didn’t get a ton of calls, but I did hear from a few constituents,” State Sen. Darcy Jech told the Times & Free Press. “I understand the frustration.”

So does Slezickey and city commissioners, all of whom are city residents and also at the mercy of the finicky OG&E electrical feed.

While Kingfisher operates its own distribution system – maintaining poles, lines and substations within the city limits – it relies on power supplied by OG&E’s transmission lines.

It’s a different relationship than the utility has with residents of Dover and Okarche, who buy power directly from OG&E and are counted among its customers. And yet, when OG&E’s aging transmission line from El Reno to Enid develops a fault, homes and businesses in all three communities are impacted.

“The OG&E 69 kV transmission line from El Reno to Enid is old and undersized,” Slezickey said. “I don’t know the age of it, but capacity growth on the line has increased since it was built.”

Meanwhile, all the work that Kingfisher has done in recent years to build up its electrical infrastructure within the city limits – efforts which won recognition from Municipal Electric Systems of Oklahoma – can’t compensate for electrical failures that happen outside the local system.

“In reviewing our system reliability with (electrical superintendent) Mark Gambill this morning, we determined it has been over a year since we have had a system outage from an internal fault,” Slezickey said in a Monday email to city commissioners and the Times & Free Press.

That’s little consolation for Kingfisher’s electrical customers, who saw their last major outage just weeks ago during a home football game and KHS Senior Night activities, stemming from another OG&E glitch.

“OG&E has recognized the issue and is projecting (installation of) a new 138 kV line (from Enid to El Reno) for 2024-25 with increased capacity and reliability,” Slezickey wrote in his email.

City commissioners approved expenditures in recent meetings to upgrade city substations to be prepared for OG&E’s higher voltage transmission line, but that major improvement is still two to three years down the road.

“While 2024-25 won’t get here fast enough, it is a complex project,” Slezickey said. “Even if OG&E were to say ‘let’s start it tomorrow,’ material, equipment and labor unavailability would make that unrealistic.

“I do not think OG&E will be inclined to make major improvements on the line with the new construction pending.”

Although devastating to local residents and businesses, even total outages in Kingfisher, Dover and Okarche represent just a small percentage of OG&E’s customer base.

“We have around 2,800 electric customers but are not included in OG&E outage reports as we are not OG&E customers, just a transmission receiver. Okarche has about 550 meters and Dover has about 200 meters,” he said.

“The 750 customer count is minimal to the 870,000 customers that OG&E serves acros the state. Even adding us in, it is not a significant client base to make immediate improvements cost effective.”

Those are all issues that could be discussed if Slezickey is successful in bringing OG&E to the table in a meeting involving OMPA and the city commission.

“We can’t just keep blaming OG&E,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out an answer.”

Speaking of answers, Slezickey’s email to commissioners also included these answers to questions frequently asked by local residents:

Why don’t we fire up our power plant and just generate?

We coordinate authorization to isolate from transmission and generate power through OMPA operations. When OG&E predicts a reasonable issue resolve time frame, we are less likely to get authorization to generate, regardless if OG&E says it will be 90 minutes, and four extensions later, we are at five hours.

We have a higher chance of getting authorization when we have severe weather that could impact restoration, than we do when the weather is good, like Saturday and last month.

Why don’t we just run our plant anyway without authorization?

A few years ago, we could do this by simply telling OMPA operations that we were isolating from incoming feed and generating internally. While we absorb the cost of doing this, it has been worth it to provide power locally.

Changes in the regulatory side of the industry have changed the way we did things in the past.

We are still working to get the generator that caught on fire repaired to bring our capacity back up to cover most of the town.

Cimarron customers never have outages, why do we?

Western Farmers Elec-tric Cooperative provides transmission for Cimarron while we are on OG&E.

There are occasions when Cimarron loses power and we are up, and times when we are both down.

WFEC and OG&E share some transmission services and both have lines in the same areas.

WFEC provides power to their participating coops from their plants in Mooreland and Anadarko while OG&E is more active in transmission from multiple power plants to multiple end users.

With the upcoming 138 kV line, we are optimistic that the project can include redundancy in Kingfisher where OG&E can be served from WFEC when needed, and WFEC can be served from OG&E when needed to reduce outage times when the cause of the outage is not in the immediate area.

The question of can we switch transmission carriers to WFEC is not as important as if our capacity would be a profitable transmission operation for WFEC, or if our rates would be impacted. It is not as simple as deciding whether to take 81 and 3 to OKC or 33 to I-35 to OKC.

If our electric is always down, why do we maintain a distribution system?

When we have internal distribution system issues, we are able to assess, repair and restore services with crews responding very quickly to an outage.

If we outsourced electric distribution we would lose that control, as well as the revenues that our utility provides to help fund other city functions.

It isn’t fair that we’re at the mercy of OG&E for power loss.

It is not, but as mentioned above, OG&E is planning upgrades that will improve reliability.

We are working on setting up a meeting with OMPA and OG&E to get more detailed information to provide to the community.