As many residents faced a lengthy blackout for the second time in three days, the NWT Power Corporation said on Friday afternoon it was moving a rental diesel generator to Hay River and the Kátł’odeeche First Nation.
Hundreds of residents lost power for up to six hours on Wednesday. The Friday outage, which began in mid-morning, lasted longer for many residents. Power ultimately returned in the early evening.
“We are continuing to struggle to generate sufficient power to meet community load. More than half the town has had their power restored but some areas such as 553 and Old Town remain without power. KFN also remains without power,” NTPC stated on Friday afternoon.
“We will be moving an additional rental generator to site as soon as we can.”
By 7:30pm, NTPC said it had been able to bring the largest generator at the town plant back online to restore electricity to customers.
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Wednesday’s outage took place on a day when the town was under a heat warning and reached 33C. Friday was a little cooler but with widespread smoke in the air.
Writing online, NTPC – which is headquartered in the municipality, and which took over the town’s power franchise from Naka Power earlier this year – acknowledged “this is very frustrating for customers.”
Hay River and surrounding communities are on diesel for the next few weeks while the Taltson hydro plant undergoes maintenance work.
Earlier, NTPC said Wednesday’s outage occurred “when one of the generators at the Hay River power plant went offline unexpectedly, resulting in the loss of approximately 500 kilowatts of generation capacity.”
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The power corp continued: “We were in the process of returning one of the larger generators back online after several months of maintenance but were running it below capacity in order to monitor its performance. The loss of those 500 kilowatts created instability on the system and the outage began.”
According to NTPC, Naka Power sent “workers with extensive knowledge of the Hay River plant to assist,” despite being forced to give up the franchise in March after years of legal and regulatory wrangling.
Friday’s outage was understood to be a similar problem, which the additional capacity from the rental generator should help to guard against in the coming days.
