After six months of uninterrupted power, the Town of Jasper experienced a two-hour outage on July 13. Two cables from the switchgear building faulted around 7 p.m., resulting in an outage that spread through the town. Many businesses shut their doors until 9 p.m., when the power came back on. The Athabasca Hotel is the only business downtown with a generator. 

“The new state of the art cable failed us,” said Rod Carrothers, spokesman for ATCO Electric. “But it was as hard a fault as you can get. It happened right outside the plant.”

The outage was caused by a ‘dead short’ at the generating source, Carrothers said.

The rest of the new equipment worked well, Carrothers said, who mentioned he has little reason to believe Jasper will see a return to the days of multiple black-outs, as was seen last January.

“The cable is being replaced and we have a contingency where we have two extra sets of cable. Despite the failure of the cable itself, all of the other components worked perfectly well together which indicates to us the integrity of the system,” Carrothers said.

Since there has only been one partial outage since January, Carrothers said he’s confident many of Jasper’s problems have been fixed.

ATCO has spent tens of millions of dollars upgrading the power grid in Jasper, and the community has seen improvements over the past few months. Carrothers said the upgrades are functioning as they should. ATCO appears to have gotten most of the bugs out of the new system, he said.

“A lot of things have happened that would have caused an outage before, but now didn’t,” Carrothers said.

He cites several examples where power would have been lost before.

“There were two instances – one was a tree between Beckers and Marmot. Before we lost the unit and dropped breakers at the town. We’ve had the same situation since and didn’t affect the town. We also had an unplanned shutdown. Before, that has caused the same events, the town trips in sympathy. Now, that doesn’t happen,” Carrothers said.

The company has also spent money to ensure all of its components are compatible. 

“Over the years... we know how many advances have been made. Compatibility has been far stretched. We’ve upgraded everything to be the same vintage (fuses, breakers, etc.). The cables are brand new. They will be the same as the rest of the system,” he said.

More than 95 per cent of power plant upgrades have taken place in Jasper, Carrothers said, including system automation (which allows power line devices to be controlled remotely), switchgear replacement, an upgrade to system protection and an ongoing proactive maintenance program.

Jasper experienced a litany of outages in December and January, but even through lightening storms the power has remained on.

The Jasper Activity Centre and the Seton General Hospital also have generators.