Unisource

The Wallow wildfire in eastern Arizona’s White Mountains on Wednesday was threatening energy facilities operated by UniSource Energy Corp.’s Tucson Electric Power (TEP) utility, but a utility spokesperson told NGI there was no immediate danger and outages so far had been avoided. Expanding at four to five miles daily, the fire has cut across 311,000 acres of dense pine forests running near TEP’s north-south transmission power lines and coal-fired generation complex at Springerville, AZ. Under threat are the two power lines that carry 1,100 MW of power from Springerville and San Juan Generating Stations into the greater Tucson area. If the fire came close enough to the power lines to shut them down, TEP can bring on additional local generation and coordinate with other utilities to avoid outages, a spokesperson said.