Outage knocked out power for entire peninsula

A power outage last Friday knocked out power for the Kenai Peninsula, affecting the entire Homer Electric Association service area and all 32,000 customers. The outage lasted from about 11:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Nov. 22. 

A problem with equipment that monitors the fuel line at HEA’s Nikiski generation plant caused the outage when the unit went offline. Compounding the problem was a break in the transmission line between the peninsula and Anchorage. A line near Girdwood had been damaged earlier last week, and because of that, the peninsula could not get back-up power from Chugach Electric. 

At the time of the outage, the entire peninsula got power for the Nikiski plant and the Bradley Lake hydroelectric plant. Because the HEA service area was cut off from the Chugach Electric lines, the outage also caused Bradley Lake to go offline.