05-08-2025
How Enova is keeping the lights on in Waterloo Region
Car crashes, severe storms and even technical failure can all contribute to power outages.
In much of Waterloo Region, Enova Power Corp. is responsible for restoring that power when outages occur.
An outage on July 8 made headlines after Thaler Avenue in Kitchener was shut down for several hours due to an electrical malfunction, which sparked a fire and forced a live wire to dance along the road.
More than 1,600 homes were without power for several hours but Enova crews helped get the situation under control.
'It does take our crews time to assess and to safely be able to repair that,' said Matt Grime, control room supervisor at Enova.
The control room is where that initial assessment begins.
CTV News was given a behind-the-scenes look at Enova's control room on Tuesday, which helps keep the lights on in Kitchener, Waterloo, Woolwich, Wellesley and Wilmot.
'We have about 165,000 customers in a service area of about 1,100 square kilometres,' said Grime. 'We're mandated to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have 14 operators in here that make that happen.'
Each work station has several monitors which track something different.
'It's the nerve centre of our day-to-day operations,' said Krystopher Demers, Enova's manager of stations and grid intelligence. '[Staff] are responsible for working with our field crews to make sure we reliably and safely provide power to our customers.'
The control room staff have to keep their head on a swivel as they triage incidents and outages. To even be a system control operator, it requires four years of schooling and at least 8,000 hours of exposure to the system.
All of that experience also goes toward keeping customers informed.
'That's another priority – alerting customers through the outage map on our website of ongoing outages, keeping them up to date on the estimated time of restoration,' said Demers.
Of course, it's not as easy as flipping a switch to restore power, especially with multiple outages at once. It could take minutes, hours or in extreme cases – days.
'So we basically work off the largest number of customers. We will try and find the cause of that first, and then we go down the list,' said Grime.
The severity of the situation and different safety concerns also factor in.
In terms of what to do if you experience an outage, Enova says customers can call in it's not already noted on their online outage map.
If the outage is being worked on, they ask for the public's patience and assure everyone they are aware of their role.
'We are the supplier in the area responsible for keeping the lights on,' said Demers.
