Insurance Against an Unlikely Outage

If you drive past our Whitehorse facility this week, you may notice some activity going on near our diesel plant and substation.

A trailer will arrive on site with four transformers that will be offloaded and connected to the substation. At the same time, four diesel generators of two megawatts each will arrive in Whitehorse and will be stored at a local business off site.

This equipment is being brought to Whitehorse as insurance against the very unlikely event that we have an extended winter power outage and lose access to our largest source of generation, our Aishihik hydro plant.

We don’t have any reason to believe there will be such an event, but we must be ready for one just in case.

Our 2016 Resource Plan identified that should we lose access to Aishihik during the winter months, we may not be able to produce enough electricity to meet demand at peak times. Having access to these four portable diesel generators should we need them ensures that we can continue to provide reliable service this winter even in an emergency.

This is a short-term measure. We are working with our parent, the Yukon Development Corporation, and the Yukon government to find more permanent solutions to address the capacity gap. However, as you know, energy projects take time, and we wanted to have a temporary solution in place until new capacity can be added to our system.