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Bitter cold prompts calls for energy conservation and efforts to get Philly’s homeless indoors

PJM Interconnection is asking consumers to voluntarily limit their electricity usage until 10 a.m. Christmas Day to avoid the need to implement short blackout periods.

No matter how cold it is outside, the pups have to be walked. Mackenzie Benedict-Sager, of South Philadelphia, walked her dogs Kennedy and Coco around the Italian Market on Saturday.
No matter how cold it is outside, the pups have to be walked. Mackenzie Benedict-Sager, of South Philadelphia, walked her dogs Kennedy and Coco around the Italian Market on Saturday.Read moreTyger Williams / Staff Photographer
    by Lynette Hazelton
    Updated 
    Published 

With the expectation of frigid weather to continue throughout Christmas Day, keeping the city’s most vulnerable residents warm has become a top priority as public utilities, worried about blackouts, urged customers to conserve energy.

Philadelphia continues under a Code Blue status, which adds more shelter beds allowing for more individuals experiencing homelessness to be transported to indoor spaces. The Office of Homeless Services is asking individuals to go to a shelter for warmth.

“Even people who will usually hunker down are coming in,” said Kathleen Kelley, Project Home’s assistant project manager for outreach coordination.

She said there are currently five outreach teams patrolling the city, where usually there are only one or two. They are looking for vulnerable residents, examining them for signs of frostbite, which under these arctic-like conditions can strike exposed skin within 30 minutes, and encouraging them to go to a shelter.

Friday night the city reached a low temperature of 7 degrees, the coldest recorded since January 2019, according to the National Weather Service in Mount Holly. While Sunday will be sunny, the wind chill will make it feel like another below-zero day, according to the weather service.

Code Blue will stay in effect until the temperature, including the wind-chill factor, reads above freezing. Residents who see a person who appears to be homeless outdoors are encouraged to call the city’s homeless outreach hotline at 215-232-1984.

To ensure continual service in the brutal cold, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) joined PJM Interconnection in asking consumers to voluntarily limit their electricity usage until 10 a.m. Sunday to avoid the need to implement rotating outages. Valley Forge-based PJM operates the grid and wholesale electricity markets for 65 million customers in 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, including Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia.

“If we don’t have enough supply to meet demand then sometimes, on rare occasions, we will have rotating outages,” said PJM spokesperson Jeff Shields.

During a rotating outage, different regions of PJM’s service area would be intentionally taken off the grid for about an hour.

“We’ve seen that consumer conservation efforts can really help, and we need it now,” Shields said. Consumers with health-related conditions are not being asked to participate.

According to the PUC, there are a number of things consumers can do to reduce electricity use including:

  1. Postponing use of major electric appliances such as stoves, dishwashers, and clothes dryers.

  2. Turning off unused electric lights, equipment, and appliances.

  3. Keeping doors and windows, including garage doors and doors to unused rooms, closed as much as possible.

  4. Setting thermostats lower and turning down the heat in unused spaces.

  5. Checking air vents to ensure they are not blocking the flow of heat.

  6. Closing curtains, drapes, and blinds at night to keep in the heat.

“It’s amazing what participation by customers can do,” said Shields, adding that PJM is calling for these preventative steps to avoid widespread outages. “We’ve learned from Texas and California and have seen the role everyday people can play.”

In the aftermath of Friday’s rain, light snow, and high winds followed by an extraordinary temperature drop from a high near 60 in the morning to below 10 at night, 124,000 of Peco’s 1.7 million customers lost power. As of Saturday afternoon, 2,900 were still without power, mostly in Montgomery and Chester Counties. According to a spokesperson, most were expected to have power restored by Saturday night. However, some customers were likely to remain in the dark until Christmas evening.

Brutally cold weather also caused delays and cancellations at Philadelphia International Airport, frustrating holiday travelers. According to the tracking site FlightAware, 11% of flights out of or into PHL were canceled and more than one-quarter of flights were delayed.

Staff writer Samantha Melamed contributed to this article.