Xcel Energy representatives presented to the Summit Board of County Commissioners on June 9 about two “major tools” the company uses to try to keep its powerlines from sparking wildfires.

Xcel community resilience manager Tiernan Doyle and Blair McGary, Xcel’s area manager for Summit, Eagle, Lake and Grand counties, gave the commissioners an overview of public safety power shutoffs, enhanced powerline safety settings and rebate programs that help prepare people for shutoffs. The commissioners asked questions and expressed concerns about the topics.

Wildfire prevention tools

Public safety power shutoffs happen when Xcel identifies extremely high fire risk in an area and proactively shuts down powerlines. Doyle said the measure is a “tool of last resort,” and the company only enacts them after a lengthy process that starts three or more days before the deenergization of lines. 

Xcel will enact enhanced powerline safety settings with a shorter process, Doyle said. The settings change how lines react to an interruption, she said, turning off if something falls on them instead of trying a few times to reenergize, as they would under normal settings. Under the safety settings, Xcel will not reenergize a line until it has been inspected in-person, meaning an outage could take longer to resolve, McGary said, often around two hours.

“That’s what the data shows, that we can deploy crews and get that line corrected in approximately two hours,” McGary said.

Commissioner Tamara Pogue asked how people can know when the safety settings are on, and McGary said Xcel does not want people to become complacent if they hear over and over that the safety settings have turned on.

“We’re in (enhanced powerline safety settings) right now a lot,” McGary said.

People can assume that the settings are on whenever there are high winds, low relative humidity and hot and dry conditions, McGary said. If it seems like a bad day to burn a brush pile, she said, it is likely that the safety settings are on. Pogue asked if those settings being on means people will likely lose power, and McGary said no.

“There’s the potential for them to lose power,” McGary said. “If they do, that outage would be longer and more extended.”

Doyle gave an overview of the process Xcel follows when implementing a public safety power shutoff, including how it increases its public communications as it gets closer to the shutoff. She said the company does not give power restoration estimations during the shutoffs because crews have to inspect and repair infrastructure, meaning the restoration times can wildly vary.

Commissioner Nina Waters asked if the size of Xcel’s crews doing those inspections and repairs changes depends on the size of the shutoff area, and Doyle said yes, the company will stage larger crews for shutoffs that cover larger areas. She said Xcel did that during a high-wind event on the Front Range in December 2025 that led to public safety power shutoffs.

McGary also pointed out that, during the shutoff preparation process, Xcel looks to whittle down the shutoff area as much as possible. For the December event, the area originally covered about a third of Xcel’s 1.6 million customers, but by the time it was implemented, it affected 50,000 customers, she said.

Pogue referenced the December event, asking why Summit County’s power went out when the public safety power shutoff had only been planned for the Front Range. McGary said the power outage in Summit County happened because several powerline poles on Ski Hill Road and Lake Hill snapped and caused a power outage, so the planned shutoff on the Front Range had not actually affected Summit County customers.

If Xcel is considering a public safety power shutoff elsewhere in the state, McGary said, that could mean Summit County is experiencing high winds, which makes the likelihood of there being a power outage in the county high.

“That does not mean we’re part of the public safety power shut off, but it means we’re part of the high wind event,” McGary said.

Brian Bovaird, the Summit County emergency management director, attended the meeting and said that the county would likely be under fire restrictions and have high fire danger if Xcel got to the point of implementing a public safety power shutoff.

“If we’re experiencing a (public safety power shutoff), in my mind, I have a lot bigger concerns,” Bovaird said. “If we look historically at our fire starts, they’re recreationalists, and unfortunately we don’t have a program to turn them off.”

Commissioner Eric Mamula asked if the county could notify residents about a public safety power shutoff happening elsewhere in the state because power outages would still be likely in Summit County. Bovaird said his office has looked to put out messaging about fire danger more frequently so people are more aware about high wind events, fire restrictions and the type of conditions that lead to power outages or planned shutoffs. 

Bovaird said the frequency of downed trees has increased recently because of the beetle kill infestation 20 years ago. He said experts in the late 2000s told county officials it would take about 20 years to see the full effects of the infestation.

“The dead and downed trees in our county is about to get exponentially worse,” Bovaird said. “Just by probability, that’s going to be more (power) outages, and that’s not Xcel doing anything with the line. I think that we’re entering new and uncharted waters.”

Doyle said Xcel has recently worked to improve communication between local public information officers and Xcel representatives. She also said the company is testing an improved outage map, highlighting that the new map will allow users to sign up for notifications about an address not linked to their account, which should especially help renters.

Mamula asked if putting all of Xcel’s powerlines in the county underground would ever be an option, and McGary replied that doing so would negatively affect the system’s reliability because underground lines are much harder to inspect and repair. Mamula asked if there are ways to harden the above-ground lines, and McGary said Xcel has added hardware to lines in Summit to allow for enhanced powerline safety settings, which is a way of hardening them.

Community support programs

Xcel offers a battery rebate program that currently offers $10,000 rebates for qualifying customers who install whole home battery energy storage systems. Doyle said the program exists because public safety power shutoffs can cause issues for customers who need power for medical equipment.

Pogue asked if $10,000 would cover the cost of a whole home battery system, and although Doyle and McGary said yes, Waters said she has heard from residents looking to install battery systems that they have been quoted between $13,000 and $17,000.

“A 13 kilowatt system is $13,000,” Waters said. “That’s for a bare bone system that’s going to power, you know, major appliances and Wi-Fi for maybe 12 hours, and (public safety power shutoffs) could last for up to 72 (hours).”

Doyle said Xcel has not had conversations about increasing the rebate but pointed out that the company is working on a rebate program for portable battery systems. She said the idea behind the batteries would be to give medically vulnerable customers more time to charge their devices and make a plan to leave, not for them to stay in their house for the whole power shutoff.

“That’s why the feedback that we’ve gotten most vociferously is that folks would like a portable battery as opposed to whole home,” Doyle said.

Waters said she would like to see Xcel have a program to cover some of the cost of food people lose in public safety power shutoffs when their refrigerators have no power for an extended period. McGary said a claims process does exist for businesses to recoup losses from lost food. She also said the shutoffs protect from wildfires that could close businesses for “well longer than a week.”

“We understand the economic impact that it can have (for businesses) on, I don’t know, July 5,” McGary said. “We don’t take it lightly, but that is the ultimate goal of this program, is to protect communities from catastrophic wildfire that will devastate them beyond repair.”