One record broken, another one tied.
That was the story for SaskPower and SaskEnergy this past week as Saskatchewan’s extremely cold conditions placed unprecedented pressures on the province’s electricity and heating source corporations.
In fact, the record set by SaskPower at 5:51 p.m. on Jan. 13 was the third time within 40 days this Crown corporation exceeded previous high electrical consumption targets in a growing province.
Saskatchewan homes and businesses reached 3,747 megawatts (MW) in power use, which topped the previous record of 3,726 MW set on Dec. 16, 2016, which in turn had beaten the 3,710 record that had been set only four days earlier.
The new record exceeded the previous one by 37 MW, the equivalent power use of 37,000 homes.
New peak electrical consumption records have now been set 11 times within the past decade, the power company said.
While that was going on at SaskPower, the natural gas suppliers and carriers at SaskEnergy and TransGas reported the daily natural gas consumption over the 24-hour period between Jan. 12 and 13, tied the previous record set in December of 2016 of 1.33 PetaJoules (PJ) of natural gas. This is the fourth consecutive winter that a new record has been established and eight of the top 10 peak-load or near record-setting days for SaskEnergy, have occurred this winter.
The previous 24-hour record was set on the same day as SaskPower’s previous record, Dec. 16, due to the extreme cold temperatures and high demand from industrial customers and power plants.
The 1.33 PJ record is three per cent higher than the previous record set in January of 2016.
A PetaJoule is a unit of measurement equivalent to one million GigaJoules (GJ) of natural gas. The average home in Saskatchewan consumes about 102 GJ of natural gas annually.
Record-setting and near record-setting natural gas usage days are happening more frequently with higher customer volumes. SaskEnergy’s system is designed around increased growth, ensuring additional capacity so that even on peak record days, the system is able to provide more natural gas than required.
“We’ve become used to seeing the record beaten every winter as Saskatchewan grows. With new technology we’re also seeing each household and business use more power,” said Mike Marsh, SaskPower’s president and CEO. “We’ve never seen new peak load records being set several times in a month. That’s why it’s so crucial we keep updating and growing our power grid. We need to make sure our customers have the power they need when they need it.”
In the meantime, SaskPower and SaskEnergy continue to urge consumers to exercise conservation measures when it comes to their power and heating needs. Homeowners are urged to turn the thermostat down if no one is going to be in the home for an extended period, use timers with vehicle plug-ins, (four hours are all that are required to keep a vehicle’s engine block warmed), and to turn off lights in rooms that aren’t occupied.
