Tens of thousands of homes in Calgary, Edmonton, Medicine Hat and other parts of Alberta were without power on Sunday night, Feb. 21, and another outage hit two Calgary communities early Monday morning.
The first outage occurred just after 9 p.m. Sunday night and left nearly 18,000 homes and businesses without power for about 17 minutes.
The second outage, which lasted until 6 a.m. Monday morning, knocked out power to about 1,100 homes and businesses in Calgary’s Varsity and Montgomery neighbourhoods.
According to Enmax, there was no connection between the two events.
Spokeswoman Gina Sutherland told CBC News on Monday that Sunday’s outage was caused by an interruption in the contact line between Alberta and British Columbia, while Monday’s outage was due to a faulty cable.
Sunday’s event automatically offloaded some load from Enmax’s system.
Mike Deising, director of communications for the operator of the Alberta Power System, told CBC News that the incident affected about 125 megawatts of load across the province, 40 megawatts of which were in Calgary.
Deising said, “We lost a major transmission line between Alberta and British Columbia and that caused frequency issues …… about 125 megawatts of load was tripped off the system almost immediately.”
“It’s really just a protection measure built into all power systems.”
The cause of the interruption to the contact line is still under investigation.
Dysing believes the power outage in AZ is different from the one in Texas, where a severe winter storm destroyed power plants and the grid, killing at least 30 people and leaving millions without power, heat and running water for several days during a severe winter.
Dessin said, “People are obviously very concerned about what’s happening in Texas and what’s happening in the United States, but what’s here is not an energy emergency alert or a situation where the grid doesn’t have enough power to stay balanced.”
Calgary drivers need to proceed with caution as some traffic signals may still be affected.
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