Providing safe and reliable power to the Rocky Mountains is no small feat. MPE’s service area combines unrelenting terrain with potential for extreme weather and wildfire, which presents unique challenges when it comes to installing power lines, managing vegetation, and restoring service during outages.
Power Lines in the Mountains
Powering MPE’s service territory isn’t as straightforward as providing electricity to a suburban neighborhood in the Denver metro area. MPE’s service area contains rugged mountainous terrain, requiring our engineering team to find solutions for steep slopes, deep snow, and avalanche terrain. For instance, our tower foundations were specifically designed for rocky and uneven ground, sometimes requiring blasting or drilling into bedrock. MPE also needs to look toward new technologies, like drones, to monitor and inspect lines throughout our mountainous service territory safely.
Extreme Weather and Power Lines
It’s no surprise that Jackson and Grand counties are prone to extreme weather, it’s one of the realities of living in the high country. MPE’s lines are built to withstand the worst the mountains can give us. We are also constantly hardening our grid with infrastructure updates. For instance, we recently replaced outdated overhead wire with stronger, more resilient infrastructure, reducing the likelihood of outages during snow and ice storms.
Vegetation Management in the Mountains
Vegetation management is an important part of providing safe, reliable, and cost effective electricity. In the mountains, it’s a little more challenging, yet MPE maintains an aggressive four-year trim cycle across our territory to mitigate outages and the potential for wildfires. Also, our service area..."Our service area doesn’t just encompass public property, it also includes public lands, national forests, and more. This makes right-of-way more complex—not only do we need to work with residents to access power lines for vegetation management and power restoration, but a mix of agencies, managers, and owners. Navigating challenging terrain also makes effective vegetation management more complex, our service area requires drones for monitoring and specialized vehicles (and a certain amount of grit) to manage vegetation in hard-to-access places.
Wildfire Mitigation at MPE
Wildfire mitigation is an increasingly essential part of providing safe power. This summer, our wildfire protocols were put to the test during the Windy Range fire. During this wildfire event, MPE leadership worked closely with first responders and our power transmission partners, Tri-State and Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), on de-energizing transmission lines near the fire to help prevent wildfire spread and protect firefighters and crews. For weeks leading up to and following the fire, MPE remained on a one-shot sensitivity system to mitigate risk of wildfires. MPE has been working hard to protect members by improving wildfire preparedness measures by securing grant funding for wildfire mitigation projects, investing in wildfire monitoring technology, partnering with local emergency response agencies, and refining emergency protocols.
Read more about how MPE’s efforts helped manage the Windy Range fire
Wildlife and Power Lines
In the wide open spaces of the mountain west, we share the land with a variety of wildlife. From protecting habitats and crews, to maintaining reliable power when birds hit the power lines, considering wildlife when building out our infrastructure is paramount.
MPE has been powering the mountain towns in Grand and Jackson counties, and parts of Larimer, Routt and Summit counties since 1946. We have decades of experience keeping the lights on in the rugged terrain of the mountain west, and are continually updating our infrastructure and systems as new technologies and innovations become available.