Whitehorse Daily Star

Hot hydro plant may have triggered outage

Heat in the Whitehorse hydro plant could have caused Tuesday’s major power failure, Yukon Energy said Thursday.

By Whitehorse Star on July 27, 2018

Heat in the Whitehorse hydro plant could have caused Tuesday’s major power failure, Yukon Energy said Thursday.

Tuesday’s widespread outage began with a trip in unit three in the Whitehorse hydro plant. Yukon Energy is investigating the cause of the trip.

Yukon Energy president Andrew Hall confirmed that there was a fried electrical component in the unit, most likely due to the heat in the plant. The temperature can get as high as 30 C.

The outage affected residents of downtown Whitehorse, Porter Creek, Carcross Teslin and Dawson City.

Hall said the diesel generators in Dawson were running and providing power during the outage. He clarified that there was a brief period without power before the generators kicked in.

The generators can’t just be fired up instantly. It can take up to 20 minutes for them to become operational, he said.

“The diesel plant was fine,” Hall said.

Power was restored in Dawson at 8:20 p.m. That was half an hour after the power came back on in downtown Whitehorse. Some Dawson residents were left wondering why it took so long.

The community was at the end of the sequences, Hall added, and power cannot be restored everywhere at the same time.

“You can’t bring them all on at once,” Hall said.

He explained that power needs to be restored practically subdivision by subdivision.

Turned back on everywhere at once would put a huge load on the system, Hall said. Eight megawatts would be used all at once.

Hall said some of the areas that took longer to get power back on Tuesday were in ATCO Electric Yukon areas.

Yukon Energy can bring back power to ATCO, but ATCO has to take its own steps to restore the juice.

Hall said there is some public frustration when people hear Yukon Energy say power was brought back on at a certain time – but their homes still lack power during that time. This usually happens in communities at the end of the restoration sequence.

Hall added that ATCO crews cannot be in several areas at once to restore power.

Jay Massie, a manager at ATCO Electric, said this power outage began at 6:39 p.m. Wednesday, and that power was fully restored by 8:36 p.m. on ATCO’s end. In total, 6,800 ATCO customers were affected.

The failure affected five ATCO substations.

Massie said no repairs were needed to ATCO’s infrastructure.

Since this was an outage caused by a trip at Yukon Energy’s plant, he said, ATCO had to wait for them to get the power up and running again. Once power was restored, ATCO could take action on its end.

“It’s a bit of a co-ordinated restoration,” Massie said.

Comments (3)

Up 1 Down 0

YukonMax on Aug 2, 2018 at 6:17 am

Faro lost power at 10:53 a.m. and it was restored at 17:14. Oh! by the way...Faro is the town talked about on the front page of this paper. Don't look for it on a YG map. They forget to include it sometimes.

Up 5 Down 0

Sally on Jul 27, 2018 at 6:32 pm

Well at least you can't blame this one on 'public conditioning' for a rate hearing because they've already been approved ahead for the next five years anyways.

Up 7 Down 1

Dan Davidson on Jul 27, 2018 at 3:28 pm

Hall is misinformed about Dawson, unless he really thinks 1 hour and 45 minutes is a brief period. During most power interruptions here, the plant had the downtown core back online inside 20 minutes, often more like 15.

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