Mega Bolts! | Friday, November 5, 2010

Imagine trying to remove a 5,900 kilogram (13,000 pound), 15 meter (50 foot) long bolt from a piece of equipment. Not a job for your average hand-held wrench! But that’s the challenge some of our staff faced recently.

There are gates at the Whitehorse dam that move up and down to control the amount of water we spill at any given time. The equipment needed to operate these gates includes a series of gears encased in metal boxes (known as a gear-boxes), and two 15 meter (50 foot) bolts. 

After more than 50 years of continuous operation, the bolts needed re-furbishing and the gear boxes had to be replaced. To do this work, we enlisted the help of a large crane.

Everything went well, although the lifts taxed the crane to its maximum capacity both in terms of height and weight. In fact, for the lift of the second bolt, two bottom plates had to be removed to reduce the bolt’s length by close to half a meter (18 inches) and reduce the weight by more than 360 kilograms (800 pounds)!

The bolts have been shipped down south for refurbishment and we've ordered new gearboxes. The new/refurbished pieces should be installed in a few weeks.

The Equipment Guard | Friday, September 17, 2010

Yukon Energy is working hard to provide you with safe and reliable power. Once again this year, we are spending two-thirds of our core maintenance budget on projects that will improve reliability. However despite our best efforts, power outages do sometimes occur. That's why we encourage you to invest in protection for your appliances and electronic equipment. There are a few options to choose from:

Outside Surge Protectors
These are sometimes called outside surge arresters and a qualified electrician can install them on your electric meter or panel to help protect your electronic equipment.

Inside Surge Protectors
These devices are installed directly between the equipment you want to protect and the wall outlet. They act as the last line of defense against power surges. Using these in combination with outside surge protectors gives you a higher level of protection.

Surge protectors act like electrical sponges, sopping up excess energy and preventing most of it from reaching your equipment. And like sponges, surge protectors can only absorb so much excess energy. So it's important to choose a surge protector with the appropriate features and ratings to match the equipment you want to protect.

Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) Systems
In an outage, a UPS will quickly switch to backup battery power. UPS are not designed for continuous use over a long period of time. Instead, the ones designed for home use give you about half an hour to save work on your PC and safely shutdown or turn off your sensitive equipment.  

• home appliances
• personal computers/laptops
• computer monitors
• televisions
• DVD, blu-ray and video game consoles
• printers
• copy machines
• external zip drives/CD ROM drives
• gas pump controls
• credit/debit card approval systems
• cash registers
• bar code scanners

Overnight Power Outage | Wednesday, July 28, 2010

People in parts of Whitehorse (Riverdale, a portion of Porter Creek, Crestview), those living along the Mayo Road, and residents of Carmacks, Ross River, Pelly and Faro lost power for a short while overnight. Most people had their power restored within a few minutes. Residents in the north part of the city had their power returned in less than half an hour.

The cause of the outage was a tree that fell on our transmission line to Faro. The tree has since been removed and the hydro system is back to normal.

Yukon Energy apologizes for this outage and the inconvenience it may have caused you.

The Power of Time | Thursday, April 8, 2010

If you live in the Southern or Central Yukon, you may have noticed some of your clocks losing time over the past several days. The cause stems from a malfunctioning control clock we use here at Yukon Energy to help us regulate the amount of power we generate.

Tending to Our Wind Turbines | Friday, February 19, 2010

As you may know, Yukon Energy has two experimental wind turbines on Haeckel Hill near Whitehorse. Together, they can power up to 150 homes. This week an article in the Yukon News stated that our wind turbines have fallen into disrepair after years of neglect. That is a false statement and we feel it's important that we correct the record.  Here are a few pieces of information we would like you to know:

• If you look up at Haeckel Hill and see that the turbine blades aren't turning, that doesn't necessarily mean the turbines are broken. They will not generate power if there’s not enough wind, if there’s too much wind, or if there is rime ice on the blades which prevents them from turning. Rime icing is a huge challenge for us. We have tried a number of things to address this issue including applying special paint to the blades to try to repel the ice, and heating the blades. Nothing has worked very well.
   
• At times when the turbines require repair, it’s not always possible to do so right away. In the winter especially, it is often unsafe for staff to do repairs and we must wait until weather conditions improve before we will allow employees to do the work. Safety is always the first priority.

• Many of the parts on a wind turbine are not simple, off the shelf components; they need to be ordered from elsewhere – often either the U.S. or Europe – and they can take several weeks to arrive.

• There is not a crane in the Yukon big enough to use for repairs on the wind turbines. A few years ago we required a crane and had to bring one up from Southern Canada at a cost of $180-thousand dollars.
   
• In terms of our maintenance schedule, we do regular maintenance on our wind turbines just as we do on all our other assets. We are very conscious of the fact that Yukon Energy's assets belong to all Yukoners and that we have a duty to maintain them properly.
   

In spite of the challenges we face with wind, we are still looking at it as one part of an overall clean, renewable energy regime. We are studying Ferry Hill near Stewart Crossing as a possible site for a wind farm and we are also looking at the possibility of a 20 megawatt wind farm at Mt. Sumanik near Whitehorse. But under the best conditions, wind only operates 30 percent of the time. So that means for every megawatt of wind power we build, we need to build a megawatt of something else, since it is needed for the 70 percent of the time that the wind turbines aren't producing power.

Your Questions About Outages | Tuesday, November 17, 2009

We have received a number of questions about some recent power outages and about what Yukon Energy is doing to improve reliability.

We apologize to all of you who have been affected by these outages. We understand your frustration and anger, and you are certainly justified in demanding answers of us.

Before going further, we must explain that there are two electrical companies that operate in the Yukon. We are the company that generates most of the power. We sell it to Yukon Electrical Company, which in turn distributes it to most of you. So while we can provide information about the generation and transmission side of the business, it would be inappropriate for us to talk about any issues related to distribution. Based on the feedback we have received, most of you don’t care where the problems originate…you just want the outages to stop. But we feel it’s necessary to explain this ‘division of duties’ so you can understand that we are only able to give you a partial picture of what’s going on with regards to power outages and why they are occurring.

There are a number of things that cause outages. Some we have no control over, such as when a tree falls on a transmission line or when lightning strikes the line. But what we want to address today are those outages we CAN control.

Yukon Energy recognizes that we have to continually work to maintain our aging system. That’s why in 2009 we earmarked approximately two-thirds of our core capital budget for projects related to reliability. Over the past several months we have been working our way through a list of maintenance projects, and as a result we have seen significant improvement. In 2009 we've had six major controllable outages on our Whitehorse-Aishihik-Faro transmission system (which serves much of the southern and central Yukon) as compared to 17 in 2008. However even six outages are a reminder to us that with a complex electrical system there are no quick fixes, and we must be diligent in terms of continuing to make improvements to our system. We are committed to continuing with an aggressive maintenance schedule for the foreseeable future and we are committed to providing safe, reliable energy for all Yukoners.

Some of you have asked why there seem to be so many more power outages here than in Southern Canada. Elsewhere in North American, the provinces and states have interconnected transmission systems. That means when there is a loss of generation in one region, utilities can call on their counterparts in another area to provide additional generation. In this way, an outage is avoided. Here in the North, we have no such back-up system. So yes, there are more outages here than in the south, but the flip side of that our outages are shorter than the national average. That’s because we have a back-up diesel system that most other utilities don’t have. This system allows us to bring the power back on fairly quickly (within an hour or two in most cases). We have all heard stories of people in various parts of Southern Canada going several days without power. Luckily that’s something we don’t have to contend with.

That being said, we realize some of you have concerns about the possibility of a winter power outage. In our next entry we’ll provide you with suggestions on how to prepare for a winter power outage and what to do if one happens.

Power is Restored | Wednesday, November 4, 2009

As of 9 o'clock this morning, power was restored to most customers, following an outage that affected much of the Southern Yukon. The power went out just after 8 a.m., after routine filter maintenance in our Whitehorse Number 4 hydro plant inadvertently caused the unit to trip off. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Last Night’s Outage | Tuesday, September 15, 2009

There was a brief power outage last night that affected Riverdale, Grainger, most of Copper Ridge, and areas south of Whitehorse including Tagish, Marsh Lake and Carcross. Power went out at 11:13 p.m. and was restored to everyone within 25 minutes. Some areas had their electricity back on within 13 minutes.

The outage occurred as we were making changes to our system to accommodate the new third hydro turbine that will be installed at our Aishihik plant within the next year. We lost stability on the system and two of our Whithorse  hydro units went down. The problem has been resolved and all units are now functioning properly. We apologize to all those who were affected by the outage.

Good News! | Friday, June 12, 2009

We have written on this blog before about the work Yukon Energy is doing to reduce both the frequency and the geographical size of power outages in Yukon. This year we implemented an aggressive maintenance schedule to upgrade our equipment and improve reliability of power. One project we recently completed involved making improvements to the governors for two of our Whitehorse hydro generators. Yesterday, we saw evidence that the work has paid off.

Because of a problem with Yukon Electrical Company Limited, power went out to part of Whitehorse yesterday afternoon. In the past, such an outage could have caused Yukon Energy's hydro units to shut down, resulting in a wide-spread outage throughout the Southern Yukon. With the new equipment, however, this didn't happen. The equipment did its job and the outage was limited to a part of Whitehorse.

While this may be no consolation to those Whitehorse residents who lost power yesterday, we see this as very good news, as it means we have identified and fixed a problem that has caused numerous grid-wide power outages in the past.