Q&A: What’s going on with the power supply in Hay River?

Hay River residents lost power for around six hours on Wednesday and then just under half a day on Friday – major blackouts during a hot and smoky summer week.

The outages – which also affected Kátł’odeeche First Nation and Enterprise – occurred when backup diesel generators failed while the region’s hydro plant, Taltson, is down for weeks of maintenance and an annual inspection.

Cory Strang is the president of the NWT Power Corporation, which is based in Hay River and responsible for generating and distributing the town’s power. We spoke with him on Friday evening about what happened and how NTPC is responding.

This interview was recorded on the evening of August 1, 2025. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: Is there any relation between Wednesday’s outage and today’s outage?

Cory Strang: It’s the same thing. We have seven generators at the plant and, of the seven, the two largest units are causing the problem.

The biggest unit just went through a major overhaul. As of Friday morning, it was good. A water pump failure occurred for the outage on Friday. Then the second-biggest unit, a 2,000-kilowatt unit, was having problems on Wednesday as well, and the same unit had problems on Friday.

So we lost our two biggest units, more than 50 percent of the capacity in the plant.

How do you try to get power back if those two biggest generators have failed?

The first step is – for the one with the water pump failure – they’ve replaced the pump already. The second contingency plan is bringing in a rental unit from Finning. That will be in the community on Saturday.

We’re also working closely with Naka Power. They have a generator, which they might bring over to Kátł’odeeche First Nation or out to Enterprise, which will free up power from Enterprise and we can transfer that power to other customers. That’s our plan of attack right now.

Is this an ageing infrastructure thing? Is it just unfortunate? Is it a power load thing on a hot and smoky week? What’s happening?

It would be classified as an ageing infrastructure item.

The communities where we have hydro in the NWT have standby diesel generation. They’re older generators, they’re more manual, we can’t monitor them with our central control.

Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s not well maintained. This big unit, we just went through a major overhaul using a technician that’s extremely experienced. So this water pump failure that we experienced today is a little bit unfortunate.

Going into next week, can you be sure this isn’t going to happen again?

That’s why we’re bringing in the rental unit. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation for NTPC. We have really good technicians. We’re bringing in more folks from Yellowknife to help out, more electricians, and we have good trade staff there working at the plant.

Once we bring in that other rental unit on Saturday, even if the biggest unit we have still has problems, with that extra rental unit we should be good.

All of this is happening in part because the Taltson hydro plant is back offline. We only just had Taltson out for a couple of years for some work on it. How come it already has to go back down for maintenance?

Every hydro plant needs to be shut down annually for an inspection. We do that in Yellowknife as well.

Yellowknife is a little different, though, because it has different hydro plants. So when you shut one down for routine maintenance and inspection, you don’t have to run your backup diesels because your loads can be handled by your other hydro unit.

So that’s a routine inspection. Taltson is scheduled for a three-week shutdown because it’s also the final completion for some of the work on the big overhaul that occurred.

It’s just an unfortunate event that’s transpired here in Hay River this week. It’s aged a lot of people, Ollie, to be honest.

Plenty of residents felt the effects. It was super warm on Wednesday. It’s pretty smoky, I gather, today. It’s a tough time to be without power for so long. Are you planning on doing anything for customers?

That’s a really good question.

We have our standard claims form that customers can fill out if they have some damages for maybe the power coming on or off, and you can please reach out to our customer service staff for anything on that side.

Unfortunately, power outages in the industry, it does happen. I was just reading how Cape Breton had a fairly extensive outage. Machinery breakdowns do happen, and we have dedicated staff to help out as much as we can.

We’re all customers. My parents, they live on Vale Island and so my mom’s mad at me at the moment. We feel it. We’re all in this together, and we’re really working hard to rectify this situation.