SAN ANTONIO – A facility rarely seen by people who don't work there is the first line of response when the lights go out. The CPS Energy Management Center is fully staffed and ready for Hurricane Harvey.
Trained operators man the Energy Management Center 24 hours every day of the year. However, during storms such as Hurricane Harvey, the staff is at full capacity.
"We are prepared to be here at full capacity at least until next Tuesday or Wednesday, in the event that it hits us as hard as it might," said Rudy Garza, senior vice president of electric distribution.
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The operators are constantly looking at screens, monitoring the hurricane, checking weather conditions and system statistics.
"How many outages we have, what the voltage is," Garza said. "Their ability to switch things around and bring power in from a different location by opening one switch and closing another switch. They can all do it remotely here. When you’re watching them and you know what they’re doing, it’s pretty impressive."
Garza explained the impressive display of colorful monitors lining the dimly lit room.
"What we do here is we perform system operations, so we monitor. We've got devices in the field that tell us what's going on as we manage the electrical flow here for San Antonio and the Bexar County region," he said.
Different operators are focused on specific regions of the city and county.
"Really focus in on the outages in that area," Garza said. "We obviously start with the biggest outages first, so if 10,000 customers are out, we will go down that particular circuit and open things up."
He said teamwork is a necessity within the building.
"We certainly bring operators together. We’ll have an alarm at one desk that impacts another desk, and so we’ve got supervision on-site that are very seasoned employees," Garza said.
It's a secure facility. Not just anyone can walk into the building, and there are checkpoints in many areas, where employees have to have a badge and specific security clearance. It's serious security for a serious job: keeping the community in the light during Hurricane Harvey's darkness.
Garza asks for patience while CPS crews work during the storm to restore power. The public can check outages across the region on the outages map on the CPS website.
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