From the office of the City of Wellington  — At 4:11 a.m. on Wednesday, June 24, Power Plant personnel brought the gas turbine on-line and broke from the Westar tie, so Westar could complete their switch upgrade east of town.

With this upgrade, Wellington will now be fed from the North on newly upgraded larger conductor. This project was estimated to take approximately 3.5 to 4 hours with a target time of 8:00 A.M. This estimated time over ran and we did not get heated up from Westar until about 8:50 A.M.  By this time – our load rose above our turbine’s capability causing our protective relays to trip on low voltage.

Our operators were able to re-energize most circuits within approximately 4 minutes and the others between 15-20 minutes when Westar heated back up. We apologize for the inconvenience of the power outage and our crews worked feverishly to keep the outage to a minimum.  This switch upgrade will be a great improvement for reliability and voltage issues. In the past, Westar has had to send someone to drive out the line and operate their switches. The new switches they have installed are motor operated and remote controlled from their operation center.

This should reduce outage time greatly. This again gave our line crews time to do some routine maintenance on our own 69KV line. Between June 19-23, the turbine has run an average of eight hours per day. Thank you for your patience.

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