On February 18, 2006 Xcel Energy initiated rolling blackouts due to a power supply shortfall of nearly 400 megawatts on its electric power system. More than 371,000 Colorado electric service customers lost power for an average of more than 41 minutes. The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) asked Xcel Energy for a report on the cause of the outages, the length of time of the outages, and the poor communications the company provided to the people who called to report outages.
