City of Madison issues energy alert

MADISON, S.D. (Dakota News Now) -The city of Madison issued an energy alert today at the request of The Southwest Power Pool.

Madison mayor, Roy Lindsay says the move comes because of this week’s hot temperatures.

The energy alert asked residents in the city to reduce the amount of power and electricity they use by doing things like holding off on using household appliances.

“If they can put off drying the clothes, put off baking,” said Mayor, Roy Lindsay.

Dan Coomes, power control manager for East River Electric, which provides power to the city, says it’s not an issue of Madison specifically, but the grid as a whole, which serves other areas.

By just making a small sacrifice, it helps save energy for other communities and keep everyone’s AC running.

“It’s really system wide and it helps out everything in that area. Whether it’s Pierre, Aberdeen, Yankton. We all get our power from the same transmission system,’ said Dan Coomes, power control manager for East River Electric.

City officials say there is not a concern for power outages and the alert is expected to be short lived.

“The anticipation is as the temperatures drop down to more normal levels, the risk of our load exceeding our generation is going to go down. And so, we’ll come back to more normal operations,” said Coomes.

In the meantime, Lindsay says this will be in the best interest of the city and its residents.

“It keeps the city of Madison’s costs down, which helps us keep the utility costs down,” said Lindsay.

While the afternoon hours did see the weather heat up, as sunset approached, things of course cooled down, putting less strain on each home’s air conditioning unit.

Due to this, Madison’s energy alert expired at 8:00 p.m. this evening.