One of SaskPower’s largest generation plants partially offline for more than 2 months | CBC News
[ad_1]
The Poplar River Power Station — one of SaskPower’s largest generation plants — hasn’t been fully functioning in more than two months.
A significant rainfall knocked the power plant near Coronach, Sask., out of commission on June 2, Joel Cherry, a SaskPower spokesperson said. Both of the plant’s two units flooded after water and debris, such as dirt and hay, spilled down the plant’s waterway into the facility.
Unit one is still offline, but SaskPower has been bringing the second unit back online over the past few days and it is now fully functioning, providing about 250 megawatts of power to the provincial grid.
“We are pulling out all the stops basically to get this facility back on, it’s one of our larger generating facilities, 582 megawatts,” Cherry said. “When you consider our total potential generating capacity, it’s almost 10 per cent.”
SaskPower hopes to have Poplar River Power Station’s first unit back online in the next seven to 10 days.
“We’ve made really good progress there,” Cherry said.
Unusual occurrence
Cherry says the outage at Poplar River Power Station — about 166 kilometres southwest of Regina — is an unusual situation.
“The whole facility flooded and we had so much debris there, we went to pretty great lengths to get it cleared out of there,” Cherry said.
“We had divers on site, we used remote controlled submersibles, we just had to flush a lot of water through the facility to get all the debris out of there.”
The Poplar River Power Station is a thermal plant. Coal is burned in a boiler to convert water into steam which is then converted into electrical electricity. Water is also used for cooling to condense the water to put back in the waterway.
“You need a lot of water to operate a thermal plant of any kind and so until we were able to clean out all the pipes and get the water running clean,we weren’t able to bring it online,”Cherry said.
Poor time for an outage
The extended outage at the Poplar River Power Station comes at a poor time for SaskPower. The crown corporation has seen record usage for the summer months due to high usage for air conditioning in response to the hot weather.
Cherry says SaskPower has been relying on power from other stations in the province to make up for the Poplar River plant being out of commission.
“One of our backup measures when the system gets tight is we have agreements with a few of our largest customers to curtail their power usage somewhat at peak time, ” Cherry said.
“We’ve had to do some of that from time to time [this summer].”
Cherry says SaskPower has also been rescheduling planned outages at other facilities to make up for the Poplar River Power Station being offline and has been importing power when possible to backstop its system.
He added the outage at the Polar River plant hasn’t affected residential customers.
In an email, Coronach mayor Cal Martin said “SaskPower seems to have this well in hand,” and echoed SaskPower’s statement that it hasn’t affected residents or businesses.
[ad_2]
