More Questions About Outages

Today's question: Why, out of every territory or province in Canada, do we get the most power outages? Someone told me it was because we have dirty energy, whatever that means.

Thanks for the question. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to preface my comments by saying there are two utilities in the territory and I can only address the outage numbers of Yukon Energy and not the utility that distributes most of the power. I don't have access to Yukon Electrical Company Limited's figures and even if I did it would not be appropriate for me to speak for that company.

Here's what I can tell you about Yukon Energy's outage statistics:

In 2009, which is the latest year for which I have complete figures, the average number of power interruptions per customer was 5.52. We reached that number by taking all our outages – both planned and unplanned – that occured throughout the territory, and averaging them out. Essentially what this tells us is that during 2009, the average Yukoner lost power five to six times because of a Yukon Energy outage. That compares with the national average of 2.31 outages per customer in 2009.

In terms of the length of outages, the amount of time a customer was without power during a Yukon Energy outage was on average .67 of an hour. That compares with the national average of 2.30 hours.

In summary, we have more outages than the national average, but they are shorter in duration.

So the question is, why are there more outages in Yukon? In southern Canada, the utilities have interconnected transmission systems. That means when there is a loss of generation in one region, utilities can call on their counterparts in another area to provide additional generation. There are also a greater number of routing alternatives to contain outages. Here in Yukon, we are not connected to the North American grid, so we don't have the kind of "buddy" system that utilities in the south have. We also recognize that some of our infrastructure is getting old. That's why we have devoted two-thirds of our core capital budget in 2009 and 2010 to upgrade our system and improve reliability. Our outage numbers have improved a lot from a couple of years ago but we know we have more work to do in terms of reliability.

On the flip side, our outages are significantly shorter than the national average, in part because we have a backup diesel system that most southern utilities don't have. This system allows us to bring back the power fairly quickly (usually within an hour). I'm sure you have heard stories about people in various other parts of Canada who have gone for several days without power.  

The second part to this question was about "dirty power". The term refers to times when the voltage is sustantially higher or lower than normal. This can cause power spikes or brown-outs and can be hard on your electronics and appliances. Yukon Energy has significant resources dedicated to ensure that we maintain consistent voltage. However it is always a good idea to buy surge protectors for any sensitive electrical equipment including appliances, computers, and other electronics.