There are still 3,000 people without power in the Denver metro area Monday

High winds knocked out power Sunday to some 50,000 homes. The vast majority of those folks are back online Monday morning after Xcel Energy crews worked through the night, but utility spokesman Mark Stutz said there are still 3,000 households without power.

And it could be tonight before everyone is back online.

That’s because crews have already tackled all the low-hanging fruit, the places where a single downed line was affecting hundreds or even thousands of customers. What’s left are dozens of outages that affect anywhere from a few hundred customers to a single house.

Stutz said work should go more quickly now that the sun is up, but it will still take most of the day to fix all the problems.

There are 230 Xcel Energy employees in the field Monday working on the outages, he said.