Creative solutions for a complex outage in Provost

May 1, 2018, 20:23 PM

Following Mother Nature’s destructive path, where AltaLink transmission structures located in a wetland were damaged due to spring melt and heavy winds, FortisAlberta found creative ways to get the power back on for nearly 1,000 customers in Provost County. This solution allowed the transmission company the time needed to complete repairs to their system – a transmission line rebuild project that would take the better part of a week. The customers impacted by this outage represented a mix of farm, residential, commercial and oilfield sites.

“The teamwork on this restoration project to do what’s right for our customers has been nothing short of fantastic,” says Cam Aplin, Vice President, Operations. “FortisAlberta really pulled together to build creative solutions to get the power back on in an outage situation that simply could not have been avoided.”

By Monday, April 30, all farm, residential and commercial customers had power restored through re-routing on our system and we had worked with our oil and gas customers to determine which sites were critical to them and with the help of engineering planning, we were able to work through plans to re-energize those as well.

In the meantime, others worked behind the scenes to get large generators from our offices in Acheson and High River out to the site to carry the remainder of the load. In total these generators had capacity to carry 4 MW and all other customers have been restored as of 11 a.m. Tuesday, May 1. Employees are monitoring the generators 24/7 to maintain properly balanced loads to ensure the safety and reliability of the system.