When winter temperatures hit as hard as they have in the past few weeks, people rely on a dependable source of power to maintain their homes. Joel Cherry is a spokesperson for SaskPower, he assures their infrastructure is built to withstand extreme temperatures.
“The cold in and of itself is not a common cause of outages. Other related events like wind and snow, thunderstorms in the summer, those do cause a significant proportion of our outages. Our facilities can hold up pretty well when it gets cold, even extremely cold like it is right now and when it comes to power generation our plants have been holding up well.”
Cherry explains demand for power is higher due to the cold temperatures, this is taken into account when timing maintenance outages. He says the majority of planned outages will occur in spring and fall when demand is lower.
“Right now, we're not at record levels, but power demand is higher than usual with the cold temperatures. We tend to have our highest power usage when it's really cold like now or when it's really hot. And that's why we tend to plan outages at our facilities in the shoulder seasons.”
Currently, he says SaskPower is able to maintain a steady supply of power for customers, even with some power being exported to the United States.
In the event an outage does occur, Cherry assures that regardless of temperature, they always work to restore power as quickly as possible.
“We're postponing or cancelling planned outages that we had expected to do because of the cold. We're not going to go and specifically shut the power off on anyone right now and we'll still get out there to restore power as quickly as we can.”
While there is enough power to go around, he does provide tips to reduce power consumption in the winter and lower power bills.
“It's beneficial to have a timer for your block heater if you're plugging in your vehicle. Even in your house, if you keep it even a degree or two cooler, instead of having the furnace set really warm, even marginal decreases, whatever you're comfortable with, could help to reduce your bills as well.”
More tips to keep costs low can be found on the SaskPower website.