During the first week of December, Jasperites experienced four power outages that affected anywhere between 100 and 600 customers.

The first three outages, which occurred on December 1 and 2, lasted no more than 15 or 20 minutes, said ATCO Electric’s vice president of distribution, Kris Sakowsky.

“They were for relatively short time periods,” said Richard Ireland, mayor of Jasper “When these things happen for an half-an-hour it’s not that difficult to respond. But when a restaurant loses all its business on a Saturday night that’s different.”

According to Sakowsky, these outages were quite unusual as they were caused by technical difficulties at the Palisades power station.

“Those are quite unusual... we have taken the affected generator out of service,” he explained.

After difficulties tracking down the exact cause of the problem, ATCO has taken one the generators out of service so that it will not trigger an outage again, he said. There are nine generators at the Palisades plant, with two back-up diesel generators. Depending on the current load, there could be anywhere from three to seven running at one time.

The fourth power outage, which occurred on Friday December 4, was due to the large snow storm that came through Jasper.

While four power outages in four days might have made business difficult for many Jasperites, Sakowsky said Jasper was not alone. According to him, the same storm would have resulted in a “large number of outages” in other areas of the province, such as Edmonton.

“I couldn’t agree that there are more power outages in Jasper than anywhere else,” he said. “Those occur almost every day on the entire Alberta grid. There a thousands a year.”

“Jasper is not unlike the rest of the grid... those were unusual because we had an intermittent problem... and we’re addressing that.”

However, Jasper is slightly different, because it actually runs separate from the provincial grid.

According to Ireland, this has been a point of contention for sometime but overall, the community has become used to the outages.

“Over the years there’s been discussion that we’re not connected to the grid, and that’s been seen as a problem. But, there doesn’t seem to be any move in the immediate future to do that,” he said. “I think that to some extent people have become somewhat accustom to it, and they’re not necessarily happy with the situation.”

Currently, ATCO is working on replacing old equipment and generators at the Palisades plant as part of their annual maintenance of the site which will hopefully reduce the number of outages and their length, Sakowsky said.

“We try and minimize that but we can’t guarantee an outage never occurs.”

Though Ireland admits the outages are an “issue that we wish would go away” he also noted that, in his experience, the outages seem to occur less frequently than previously.

“It would be nice if it was entirely reliable but I suppose there are realities that make that impossible,” he added. 

While ATCO only has four confirmed power outages, Sakowsky said there may have been some intermittent trips as well. “It senses a problem on the power system, so it trips and recloses the circuit very quickly,” explained Sakowsky.

The difference between an outage, and an intermittent trip is a matter of time, he noted. A intermittent trip means the system will just trip and then reclose, within a matter of seconds. Whereas an outage will be for a minute or longer.

According to Sakowsky, Jasper does not experience more power outages than anywhere else in the province. However, ATCO could not provide statistics to support this statement before time of printing.

Other reasons he gave for the area experiencing power outages, include trees falling on power lines, winter conditions, such as icing or snow on the conductors, vehicles hitting hydro poles, birds or other animals affecting equipment, or a mechanical or technical failure.

The mayor noted that previously ATCO have reported to Council and the Municipality about “what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to combat these issues.”

The Fitzhugh is currently waiting on ATCO to supply more historical data on the power outages in the town.