Parts of South Lake Tahoe without power

Updated Jan. 19 4:55pm: Randy Kelly with Liberty Energy and a longtime NV Energy employee in South Lake Tahoe said a tree went across a power line, knocking out power for a few hours Tuesday night in the Tahoe Island area. The company has no plans at this time to inspect trees/limbs that may be waiting to fall.

By Kathryn Reed

Power went out in parts of the Tahoe Island area of South Lake Tahoe just before 7pm Wednesday night.

Liberty Energy, the company now responsible for keeping the lights on on the California side of the Lake Tahoe Basin, did not know why the outage occurred or how many customers are affected.

Spokesman Mark Johnson told Lake Tahoe News at 7:54pm the company is looking into the issue.

A bit of irony is Liberty Energy hosted a lunch meeting Wednesday with head honchos Bob Dodds and David Pasieka going on and on about customer service and their ability to handle outages.

Liberty, a subsidiary of CalPECO, took over Nevada Energy’s 45,000 California customers at 12:01am New Year’s Day.

Liberty is buying power from NV Energy. The latter decided it wanted to divest itself of California customers so it could focus on one state. Dodds, at the meeting, said NV Energy would be handling substations in California for Liberty.