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ENERGY BAROMETER
Alberta will almost certainly face a power outage in the future similar to that experienced recently in Saskatchewan, says a power industry expert who heads a company planning to build a new transmission line between Alberta and Montana.
Formerly an executive at Saskatchewan Power Corporation, which was affected by the massive outage, Lorry Wilson, a founder of Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. (MATL) and managing director of Calgary-based Rocky Mountain Power Inc. (RMPI) , says a lack of transmission in Saskatchewan and Alberta as well as over-reliance on coal-fired power makes both provinces vulnerable to these occurrences.
'This (the power outage) could as easily have happened in Alberta and I think it will," says Wilson.
"It will get ugly in the next few years," he points out.
SaskPower began experiencing problems, caused by a major storm in the Midwest United States, which is linked to Saskatchewan via the Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO).
That storm took out about three SaskPower lines initially and tripped another 10 facilities offline.
SaskPower, which provides all of the province's electricity, was importing power from the MISO system at the time and the U.S. weather problems cascaded into Saskatchewan, causing some of the Crown-owned utility's units to trip offline.
Those failures occurred at its:
- Boundary Dam power station, a coal-fired plant near Estevan that has a generating capacity of over 800 megawatts;
- at the Queen Elizabeth power station in Saskatoon, which provides 386 megawatts of natural gas-fired power; and
- at a hydroelectric plant near Nipawin that has a capacity of 255 megawatts.
Overall, SaskPower has generating capacity of 3 206 megawatts on its own, with another 446 megawatts supplied by independent power producers.
As...