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Oklahoma power companies under conservative operations advisory

Posted at 5:29 PM, Jul 06, 2022
and last updated 2022-07-06 19:29:50-04

TULSA, Okla. — This heat is creating a higher demand on the power grid because of that the Southwest Power Pool which covers 14 states including Oklahoma issued a conservative operations advisory that lasts from Wednesday to Friday.

A conservative operations advisory can sound concerning but Public Service of Oklahoma officials say this only affects power companies, not the consumers.

“It has some effect on the way we (PSO) manage our supply and transmission facilities,” said Wayne Greene with Public Service of Oklahoma.

Basically, he says during this advisory, power companies have to report certain things to SPP before they do it.

According to a chart from SPP, the conservative operations advisory is only one step away from a level one energy emergency alert level, but Greene says there’s a big difference between the two.

“A conservative operations advisory is based on the forecast. They looked at the forecast and said 'It's going to be hot. There’s not going to be much wind. We are going to go into a conservative operations advisory.' Now before we go into that next step there would have to be evidence that the supply of energy and the demand of energy aren’t in a good place,” he explained.

While this advisory doesn’t impact the public, Greene says if a person wants to conserve energy there are many ways to do that beyond raising the thermostat a few degrees.

“You want to close your drapes during the sunlight hours. You want to make sure you don’t have any furniture covering your vents so that you are getting all the cooling that your paying for," Greene said. "Other things you can do are get out of the house go someplace where someone else is paying for the energy to cool things off.”

Lastly, he says you can conserve energy by delaying the use of electrical appliances to early morning and overnight.

There are dozens of more ways to conserve energy on the PSO website.


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