August 14, 2012
Prince Edward Island

Cause of power outage a mystery

Mike Carson | Journal Pioneer | www.journalpioneer.com 13 August 2012

SUMMERSIDE – The cause of Sunday’s power outage remains a mystery and may never be determined by the city’s municipal works crews.

Summerside Chief Administrative Officer, Malcolm Millar, said crews were out Sunday and Monday trying to determine why the power went out in certain areas of the city.

“We’re trying to figure it out today,” Millar said. “We think it has something to do with our transmission line from the wind farm into our substation. When it went out, we looked at our substation and there were no damages there.”

Millar said the power was restarted only to trip out again.

“Then we started it back up without the wind turbines turning and it stayed on,” he said. “So we’ve got crews out full boar this morning looking at our transmission line in detail to see if there’s anything there causing a hiccup that we need to address.”

Greg Gaudet, director of municipal services, said Monday crews haven’t been able to find a cause.

“It tripped off on us. We checked everything out, no apparent damage, nothing seemed out of sorts,” said Gaudet. “We re-engaged it and the next time it went out again. We checked it all out again and nothing.”

Gaudet said it seems to be a piece of equipment that’s in the process of failing.

“We just can’t find it,” he said.

The wind farm is back up and operational now as well.

“Ever since this (Monday) morning we put it back on line but we believe that’s where the source (of the problem) is coming from but we’re not totally sure,” he said.

Gaudet said sometimes outages, such as the one that occurred Sunday, are caused by rodents or birds getting into the substation.

“But we didn’t see any carcasses, no damaged equipment and all the equipment is saying everything’s working fine,” he said. “It’s a mysterious one… I don’t have a real solid cause but I know everything’s back to normal.”

See more on this story in Tuesday’s edition of the Journal Pioneer.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/08/14/cause-of-power-outage-a-mystery/