How CORE Electric handled high winds differently than Xcel [Video]

PARKER, Colo. — With 1.5 million electric customers, Xcel Energy is the powerhouse of power in Colorado.

CORE Electric Cooperative has one-tenth as many customers.

Despite also having power lines that felt the same high winds last weekend, CORE did not shut off power to customers on purpose, like Xcel did for 55,000 people.

CORE’s equipment has similar fail safes like Xcel has, that can shut off electricity to power lines if a tree falls into the lines or a power pole falls over. They are called reclosers, which are like circuit breakers, and CORE upped the sensitivity of its reclosers and relied on those instead of purposefully shutting off power to its customers.

“We set ours, at the substation level, to just not reclose or automatically turn the power back on for everybody, which means longer, larger outages than we would like, but it saves …