The University of Oregon will test its ability to run independently from city power over spring break to prepare for future emergencies. During this and other tests, there will be power outages on campus.
Between 8-8:15 a.m. on March 24, the university will briefly go into “island mode,” according to Rick Tabor, co-director and utilities electrical superintendent. This is where the university will divorce from Eugene Water & Electric Board power and generate all its own power with three 2.2 megawatt natural gas and diesel generators.
Island mode is a way for the university to protect itself during events like the winter storm of 2019. Fluctuations in power can be dangerous, even for the power plant itself.
“Back in that February storm, we had power sags and swells when there was ice on the lines,” Tabor said. “During an unstable event, sensitive equipment doesn’t like it — it’ll trip off or shut down. Even in the power plant, we lose boilers, we lose equipment. So during an event like that, we go to island mode and stabilize that power to ride through the storm.”
But despite only taking 15 minutes, it hasn’t been easy to get the university on board. Tabor said they’d been planning it for two years.
“It finally got to the point where we had to put a little more fire under it,” Tabor said.
The day before the test, the university will also be replacing some of the electrical breakers, causing rolling power outages through all buildings. According to Tabor, some of the breakers that protect the electrical cables on campus have been recalled, and the risks outweighed the benefits.
“The reason we haven’t done it is because campus does not like to have power outages. But it’s gotten to a point where it’s now a safety issue,“ Tabor said. ”So I’m going to simply take a breaker out, swap in a breaker that the recalls have been done.”
The outages will happen between 8 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. on March 23. The outages will be rolling, and Campus Planning & Facilities Management published a list of which buildings will be affected when.
Paul Langley, co-director for operations and maintenance, encouraged students to power down or unplug their devices during these times, as the outages can be a danger to certain equipment.
“If you feel it is valuable and important to you and you want to protect it, it’s better safe than sorry to just to shut it down,” he said.
Tabor agreed, saying, “If you feel your equipment is sensitive, we’re recommending that you go ahead and hit the power button or make plans for your sensitive equipment.”
UO is a research university, so communicating with staff and faculty about their sensitive equipment has been a process two years in development, according to Tabor.
“We’ve got microscopes that are worth $600,000, we have MRI machines that are worth I have no idea how much, we have professors with experiments. We really don’t know what’s going on out there,” he said.
All staff at Campus Planning & Facilities Management will be available during the shutdown for training purposes, and if anything goes wrong on campus, faculty are informed of an online form where they can submit issues they see.
“We’re setting it up so in a perfect world, a perfect situation, we could go as quickly as painlessly as possible,” said Langley.
