silhouette of high voltage electrical pole structure
Thousands of Alberta households lost power Friday morning as a shortage of electrical generation prompted the province’s electrical system operator to temporarily cut usage.
Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) declared a grid alert as of 6:49 a.m. Friday, citing “tight supply.” The alert ended just after 11:15 a.m., and lasted about 75 minutes longer than AESO initially expected.
So what caused the Alerts & rolling blackouts on Friday morning?
AESO said “a combination of many things”
First, a number of generation units were offline early Friday as part of a planned outage during the “shoulder season” of typically lower demand, while others were returning to service after being offline the day before, as well as a natural gas unit that had been operating at full capacity went offline at 8:49 a.m., resulting in a loss of 400 megawatts.
To help alleviate the situation, Enmax turned off power to about 25,000 Calgary customers for about 14 minutes, while Epcor shut off power to about 20,000 customers across Edmonton for less than 30 minutes.
Fortis Alberta said about 15,000 customers in rural areas lost power, from the northeastern community of Conklin to the southern Alberta hamlet of Skiff.
AESO expects normal operating conditions Friday evening and through the weekend.
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