From
Seattle Times staff reporter
A surge in electricity usage by customers in the Pacific Northwest dealing with unusually cold temperatures, as well as an outage at a massive natural gas storage facility Saturday afternoon, prompted Puget Sound Energy to urge its customers to conserve energy Saturday evening.
The company supplies approximately 1.2 million customers in the region with electricity and over 900,000 with natural gas.
“We ask our customers to use natural gas and electricity sparingly in the evening hours.” PSE said shortly after 6 p.m. on the social media platform
The company provides the customer with additional contributions
On
The outage occurred around 2 p.m. and added to the company's concerns about the power grid, PSE spokeswoman Christina Donegan said at 7 p.m. At 7:30 p.m., Donegan said operations at the facility were back online.
Donegan did not provide any information about why the outage occurred.
According to PSE's website, the facility is the 14th largest gas storage reserve in the country. It can hold about 44 billion cubic feet of natural gas and is expected to meet up to 25% of the Pacific Northwest's peak winter demand.