Power restored in Behchokǫ̀ and Yellowknife after outages
Power has been mostly restored after an unusually long power outage affecting Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀ on Saturday afternoon.
The Northwest Territories Power Corporation (NTPC) acknowledged the outage in a 3:15 p.m. MT post on social media.
The power corporation said power had been restored to Behchokǫ̀ in another social media update at about 4:15 p.m.
In Yellowknife, NTPC said power had been restored to the "the majority of the community" by about 5 p.m.
"We are working with Naka Power to resolve issues on one feeder," NTPC said.
In Yellowknife, power is supplied by NTPC and distributed by Naka Power Yellowknife.
In Behchokǫ̀, power is supplied and provided by the Northwest Territories Power Corporation.
Both communities get most of their energy from the Snare Hydro System, with Yellowknife getting additional hydroelectric power from the Bluefish hydro system. Both communities also have backup diesel power plants.
In an email, NTPC spokesperson Doug Prenderghast said the power outage is believed to have originated in Yellowknife's power distribution system, and not during power generation.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
06-04-2025
- CBC
Extended Yellowknife power outage caused by breaker failure: Naka Power
A broken breaker at a power distribution substation caused Saturday's extended power outage in Yellowknife, Naka Power says. Jay Massie, the utility company's vice president, told CBC News that the city-wide outage was caused by the failure of an "integral" piece of Naka Power's equipment, a "big breaker" at one of its three power distribution substations for Yellowknife. "It just failed completely," Massie said. The outage began around 3 p.m. MT. Some Yellowknifers got their electricity back around 5 p.m., but many were without power for much longer. The last Yellowknife customers had power restored around 10:30 p.m., leaving them without electricity for over seven hours, Massie said. The outage also affected Behchokǫ̀, N.W.T., leaving residents there without power for about an hour Saturday afternoon. Massie said the failure of the "integral" breaker, which was located at Naka Power's Niven Lake substation, was the "root cause" of both the Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀ outages. He added that Saturday's outage was unrelated to another extended outage in Yellowknife that occured several weeks ago. Unanswered question about outage The breaker's failure was "unexpected", Massie said, and Naka Power still doesn't know what caused it. He added that crews have not yet found any indication that anything was wrong with the breaker leading up to the outage. "It's not typical that we see that piece of equipment fail as it did," he said. "It's about 15 years old. Still, we test and maintain them on a yearly basis." Massie said it was also "unexpected" that the failure of this breaker would cause a city-wide outage at all — let alone an outage in Behchokǫ̀, a community more than a 100 kilometres northwest of Yellowknife that has a different power distributor. Naka Power doesn't know yet why the broken breaker caused such a serious outage, but it and NTPC — the power distributor for Behchokǫ̀ — are investigating, he said. CBC has requested an interview with NTPC about the cause of the Behchokǫ̀ outage. Confusion around the unexpected severity of the power outage was part of the reason it took so long to fix, Massie said. Technicians originally thought an issue with the power generation in Yellowknife caused the outage, he said, adding that NTPC would have had to fix that. Naka technicians started repairs after 4:30 p.m., once they realized the company's own broken equipment caused the outage, he said. Breaker still needs to be replaced Massie said Naka was able to end the outage by rerouting Yellowknife's electrical grid, to bypass the Niven Lake substation altogether. But the part that broke still needs to be replaced. The company hopes to replace it and get the substation back online by the end of this week, he said. Until then, Massie said Yellowknife will be getting all of its power from Naka's two remaining functional substations. Massie said there shouldn't be any reliability or demand issues on the city's power grid as a result of this setup. "The distribution system is designed for this," he said. "Fortunately, it's not -40 C. But even in that time, when there's a lot of load on the system, the system is designed to back itself up."
CBC
06-04-2025
- CBC
Power restored in Behchokǫ̀ and Yellowknife after outages
Power has been mostly restored after an unusually long power outage affecting Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀ on Saturday afternoon. The Northwest Territories Power Corporation (NTPC) acknowledged the outage in a 3:15 p.m. MT post on social media. The power corporation said power had been restored to Behchokǫ̀ in another social media update at about 4:15 p.m. In Yellowknife, NTPC said power had been restored to the "the majority of the community" by about 5 p.m. "We are working with Naka Power to resolve issues on one feeder," NTPC said. In Yellowknife, power is supplied by NTPC and distributed by Naka Power Yellowknife. In Behchokǫ̀, power is supplied and provided by the Northwest Territories Power Corporation. Both communities get most of their energy from the Snare Hydro System, with Yellowknife getting additional hydroelectric power from the Bluefish hydro system. Both communities also have backup diesel power plants. In an email, NTPC spokesperson Doug Prenderghast said the power outage is believed to have originated in Yellowknife's power distribution system, and not during power generation.
CBC
16-01-2025
- CBC
NTPC says it's preparing to bring Taltson hydro online; addresses outages
The Northwest Territories Power Corporation is preparing to return the Taltson hydro facility northeast of Fort Smith, N.W.T., to commercial service in the coming weeks as a nearly two-year overhaul of the facility nears completion. The 60-year-old hydro plant has been off since May 2023 so its turbine and generator could be replaced. The facility was only expected to be offline for six months, but the power corporation said the work was prolonged because of the 2023 wildfires and mechanical problems. Communities in the South Slave have been powered with diesel generators in the meantime, which are facing challenges of their own. NTPC blamed worn out diesel generators as the reason for power outages in Fort Smith earlier this month. Fort Resolution, which is also relying on diesel generators due to the overhaul, had a 14-hour outage over the weekend. Shannon Scott, guest host of CBC's Trail's End, spoke to NTPC spokesperson Doug Prendergast Wednesday afternoon about Taltson's return to service and the recent outages. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What happens as a part of the testing — or, as you call it, the commissioning process – for Taltson? Commissioning is really a series of tasks that our project team and contractors undertake before we can return Taltson to service. It involves things like inspection and testing equipment. We run different components of the hydro unit, stopping and starting them, taking measurements to check that clearances are correct, visual inspections and a number of other tasks. It's to ensure that everything looks good before we actually test it and put it back into service. Part of this testing is going to involve some power outages. How many are you expecting in Hay River and Fort Smith? I'll sort of explain why they're needed and then we can talk about numbers. Once we reach a certain point in the process, a number of tests have been completed, we start doing some load testing. So what that means is we create electricity demand and see how the Taltson unit and the associated infrastructure like substations, transmission lines, etc., respond. We'll be starting with something we call the 25 per cent level. That just involves power to Pine Point. There are no customers impacted by that. So that would be the first step to see how things work. Then subsequently, we increase the load to 50 per cent, 75 per cent and finally 100 per cent. When we get to the 50 per cent mark, we need to have a planned outage in Fort Smith to create that electricity demand that's required to test how the unit performs. It should be relatively short, maybe up to 20 minutes or so. Then in subsequent tests, as we do 75 per cent and 100 per cent, we will also be adding some of the load from Hay River. Right now, it looks like there will be approximately five short outages in Fort Smith over four days and four in Hay River over three days. It's a bit of a moving target, but that's that's the current schedule. With all of the unexpected and lengthy outages we've seen recently, what's your message to people who may have lost confidence in NTPC? We understand it's been a challenging time, in Fort Smith and Fort Resolution in particular. We are committed to getting Taltson back online. Hydro power is very reliable. I think customers who have been in the South Slave for a period of time would recognize that Taltson is a great workhorse. Very rarely do we experience any kind of extended outages. As you test the facility to get it ready again, what will that mean for water levels and ice safety? In the immediate vicinity of the facility, there's really not a lot of ice. We've been keeping the inside of the facility warmed and therefore the water in the immediate vicinity is above freezing. So certainly there is the presence of some ice, but certainly not a lot in terms of water levels. There's just a section of the Taltson River system that will see a change in water levels, the area immediately downstream of the plant, because since the unit went offline in May of 2023, water has not been flowing through the plant. So the area downstream, there's no water going there. But the total amount of water coming down the Taltson River doesn't change. It takes a slightly different route. And I believe it's only about two or three per cent of total water that's coming down the river that goes through our plant. When are you expecting the plant to be back up and fully operational? At this point, it looks like we'll have completed all the necessary testing by late January or early February. And if people want to stay up to date on planned power outages or when the facility is back up and running, what is the best way for them to do that? The best way is definitely through our social media, particularly Facebook. We've announced that the first outage in Fort Smith will happen on Jan. 19, but we haven't provided a time. We intend to do that on Friday. We didn't want to provide a time too early. We also are aware of the fact that it's supposed to be quite cold in the community on the weekend, as well as there's a large women's hockey tournament in town. Those things are going into our planning for this initial first planned outage.
