The natural gas utility serving the Portland metro area and other parts of Oregon has lifted a conservation request and is telling customers they can resume normal energy use as frigid temperatures continue to chill the Pacific Northwest.
On Saturday afternoon, NW Natural asked customers to curtail natural gas use as energy demand rose due to the cold weather. The utility followed up Sunday morning with an alert lifting the conservation request.
“Thank you for your patience and cooperation regarding our request yesterday that customers take actions to conserve energy,” read NW Natural’s note to customers. “At the time, we faced record demand as well as an issue with one of the region’s storage facilities in Washington state that helps serve the Pacific Northwest gas and electric systems.”
Around 2 p.m. Saturday, a natural gas storage facility in Washington that feeds a major pipeline along the Interstate 5 corridor went offline, causing concern that it could disrupt the flow of gas to customers. Multiple utilities in Washington and Oregon, including NW Natural, asked customers to conserve both electricity and natural gas on one of the coldest nights of the winter season.
The storage facility was back online early Saturday evening and was fully operational by Sunday, according to a spokesperson for Puget Sound Energy, part owner of the Jackson Prairie natural gas facility near Centralia. Failed redundant fiber optic cables caused the outage, the company said in an email.
“The fiber optic network is like the nervous system in the human body – it sends control signals throughout the facility,” a Puget Sound Energy spokesperson said in the email. “Without a fiber optic network, the work at the facility can be more manual. We have redundant systems in place to help with back up.”
A spokesperson for the pipeline operator, Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies, confirmed in an email Sunday that any issues had been resolved.
In Oregon, the largest share of electricity is generated from hydropower. About 38% of power use is from hydro, according to the State Department of Energy. Natural gas comes in second, and just over 24% of electricity used is from natural gas. Nearly three in five Oregon households also use natural gas as their primary heating source, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
