The stakes were high for Robert Lujan when the power went out at his Athmar Park home, again. The Nuggets were playing in the NBA Finals. He wasn't going to miss a minute, so he went to crank up his generator. It didn't trouble him too much.
"It happens, just whenever there's bad weather," he said. "It doesn't bother us. We've got a couple of power sources to get things going."
The stakes were significantly higher for Loren Ellison.
"I'm currently a nursing mother, and we were worried about our breastmilk stash going bad, because it's liquid gold," she said, "especially because they're pretty inconsistent about updating us about when its going back on, so you're just kind of waiting."
Both neighbors said they've lost power unexpectedly three or four times in the last year or so. It's a topic that's come up on the Athmar Park Facebook page recently, too.
"Does anyone know why we're having SO many power outages lately?" one person wrote. "Feels like I'm resetting the dang oven clock every two weeks these days!"
We wanted to know more, so we asked Xcel if they had neighborhood-level data on outages. Our timing was good, they told us, because they've recently published a map with exactly that information. For us, it's a chance to see how infrastructure varies across town. For Xcel, it's part of an ask they're making to state regulators, to change how they address inconsistent power for already underserved customers.
Here's what we know about outages in Denver:
Michael Renman, manager of electric distribution system performance for Xcel, said the company has been tracking two metrics on outages for decades.
One is called CEMI-6 and measures the number of customers in a given area that have dealt with six or more outages in one year. The other is CELI-12. It measures the number of customers who've dealt with 12-hour-long outages in a year.
(CEMI stands for Customers Experiencing Multiple Interruptions and CELI stands for Customers Experiencing Long Interruptions.)
Until recently, Xcel could only calculate these figures on broad, regional levels. But the utility has rolled out "smart meters" in the last few years that now allow them to see individual outages and usage in real-time. That tech made way for SAIFI - the System Average Interruption Frequency Index - a new metric that lets the company calculate average disruptions on a much smaller and more specific scale.
Xcel's new map shows SAIFI scores for 2022 across the state. Rural areas see the worst service because of the sheer distances between homes and substations, Renman said, sometimes rising above nine days of outages in some areas, on average. Nowhere in Denver hits quite so high of a score.
Still, the places that do see more average outages - up to five in 2022, according to Xcel's data - follows a familiar layout: the "Inverted L," where residents are less likely to be white, affluent and college educated. Athmar Park and other westside neighborhoods typically average more outage days than those in the center of town. The highest SAIFI score in the city was a small tract in Westwood, just west of Morrison Road.
Most areas of Denver didn't register with Xcel's CEMI-6 scores in 2022, which means most people did not experience more than six outages last year. Western Westwood and eastern Athmar Park did, though. An area southeast of Sloan's Lake had the most homes - about 24 - to earn this designation.
Outages are directly tied to infrastructure and investment, but there's more to fix than Xcel can cover at once.
If you live in an older part of town, you may have power lines hanging over your house that have seen better days. It's that physical structure, exposed and rotting, that causes outages, Renman said.
"There's a large base of overhead infrastructure that was built 60-something-plus years ago, and as you see that infrastructure age - it's still useful, but it gets to the point where you're seeing it increasing levels of outages," he told us, adding that about one third of the utility's power lines are still above ground.
Once Renman crunched the numbers, he was surprised to see how concentrated service issues were, particularly in rural areas. They'll bury lines where they can, especially if there's ongoing construction to latch onto, but they can't do it everywhere.
"The overhead-to-underground construction is a quite expensive way to improve reliability," Renman told us.
He said Xcel will likely prioritize rural areas for now, since outage scores are higher in those areas. Hollie Velasquez Horvath, Xcel's vice president of state affairs and community relations, said the utility has also inherited derelict equipment in need of extra attention from other companies they've bought out in rural areas.
And Xcel is feeling extra pressure to fix old infrastructure right now. Last month, officials in Boulder said a downed power line contributed to the Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in state history that destroyed entire neighborhoods in Superior and Louisville in 2021. Three major lawsuits have been leveled at Xcel in recent weeks as a result of the Boulder officials' findings.
Xcel is angling to change how they compensate people for too many outages.
At the end of June, Xcel filed an application with Colorado's Public Utilities Commission that asks, in part, to change how they compensate customers who experience six or more outages in a given year. Right now, anyone who hits that threshold is awarded a $50 credit. If their proposal is approved, that figure would drop to $25 for most people. The payout would also rise to $75 for customers who live in areas deemed "Disproportionately Impacted Communities," an official state designation for communities of color, low-income areas and places where people don't speak English - to name a few - that was revised earlier this year.
Renman said this new system would incentivize Xcel to fix bad infrastructure in these Disproportionately Impacted Communities, since they'll have to pay out more money to those customers.
"We have to prioritize everything we do, so that we're spending the funds efficiently, bringing the most benefit to the widest group. But that's one thing we're actually changing somewhat here. That approach of bringing the widest benefit to stretch the dollar the furthest can leave some neighborhoods behind," he told us. "This filing that we've made helps to bring those incentives more in line with helping prevent those unacceptable levels of service."
While he said Xcel has thought about equity for a while, Velasquez Horvath said the utility focused more on disenfranchised customers in the last few years, after George Floyd was murdered and as the whole nation took stock of representation and access in a new way.
Colorado's regulators are still processing their application. A spokesperson for the state's Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate, which typically weighs in on changes like this, said the consumer watchdog hasn't decided if they'll approve of the proposed compensation or anything else in the application.
Whatever happens, it may not matter to their customers in Denver. Lujan said he could care less if he gets a payment for too many outage days; he's got his generator, after all. And Ellison said she'd rather just have reliable power instead of a small credit to her bill.
"It's a nice gesture. I would also say I work 100% from home, so if it does go out during the day, then I'm just stuck," she said as her two little kids got ready for bath time. "Considering that lost time, $25 to $75 is not a huge amount."
