After an hours-long power outage in Yellowknife, Dettah and Ndilǫ, MLAs wanted to know what can be done to prevent similar events from disrupting the lives of individuals and businesses.
While “wildlife contact” was initially the blackout’s suspected cause, the NWT Power Corporation revealed on Friday a failed electrical connection within the Jackfish substation was the culprit.
In the legislature on Friday, Range Lake MLA Kieron Testart said constituents had told him such outages contribute to their desire to leave the North.
“It’s getting unbearable,” said Testart.
Frame Lake MLA Julian Morse said minister responsible Caroline Wawzonek had been “working tirelessly” on longer-term solutions like expanding the Taltson hydro system to the North Slave. But, he added, “I wonder if we’ve been neglecting some more basic actions we could take to stabilize our system in the near term.”
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Wawzonek said the heart of the issue remains the absence of a connection between the NWT and North America’s continental grid.
“Not having our grids connected leaves us very vulnerable, and so we wind up having outages more frequently when there’s only one line that runs to a single generating source,” said Wawzonek, referring to the hydro that powers Yellowknife. Diesel generators are used as a backup.
“Typically, we’d be able to bring the diesel back online – but if that doesn’t happen quickly, we wind up in the situation we found ourselves in yesterday,” said Wawzonek of Thursday’s outage.
To make power more reliable and affordable, Wawzonek said the GNWT is now implementing integrated systems planning, one of 11 directives issued to the Public Utilities Board last spring.
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The process will involve looking at various supply and demand scenarios between now and 2050, to understand how energy and climate targets can be met and which infrastructure will be needed to reach these goals.
“The fact that we don’t have integrated systems planning in the North, in my mind, is very urgent,” said Wawzonek, adding the process is now moving forward.
The minister also said a grid modernization project is under way along the Snare hydro system.
“We need to get to a place where a grid system and a generating system that was built in the 70s is modernized, that the transmission lines are brought up to speed,” said Wawzonek.
She said a recent procurement notice from the Department of National Defence was a sign of future federal investment that might allow for infrastructure upgrades.
“They would be a big customer for the power that can then – as an industrial customer – allow us to do the investments that don’t have to go on ratepayers,” said Wawzonek.
MLA for Yellowknife Centre Robert Hawkins called for the creation of a fund to support enterprises that have equipment damaged by power surges.
He also called for credits to be distributed for losses created by outages lasting more than two hours in extreme weather.
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“This isn’t an area where governments would generally set up funds or provide public funds for those purposes,” said Wawzonek, adding that in some cases, insurance might be available to recoup some costs.
“There [is] a significant amount of work in this territory that needs to happen to modernize our grid, to modernize our system, to bring our facilities up to modern standards so that we can better integrate renewables, have more resiliency, have more redundancy,” said Wawzonek.
“That work is urgent, that work needs to get done and at the moment, that is the focus of both our human resource efforts and our funds.”
