Two Crown corporations announced that they each broke records while supplying Saskatchewan customers with warmth during some extremely cold weather.
Natural gas consumption in the province climbed to a new all-time high of 1.50 PetaJoules (PJ) between 9 a.m. CT on Dec. 29 and 9 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2017.
SaskEnergy said this broke the previous record, 1.43 PJ, set on Dec. 26, 2017.
A PetaJoule is equivalent to 1,000,000 GigaJoules (GJ). The average Saskatchewan home uses about 102 GJ of natural gas annually.
SaskEnergy said these records are being set more frequently, but their system is designed so that even on peak record days it can provide more natural gas than is required.
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SaskPower also announced Tuesday that the province set a new power use record during the holiday cold snap.
At 5:42 p.m. on Dec. 29, 2017, the total system load reached 3,792 megawatts (MW).
The previous peak set on Jan. 12, 2017 was 3,747 MW.
SaskPower said the increase of 45 MW is equivalent to the electricity required to power 45,000 homes.
“We continue to see these records set every single year, sometimes multiple times in the same month and there’s a good chance it will happen again before winter ends,” Kory Hayko, SaskPower’s vice-president of transmission and industrial services, said in a press release.
“This is why we continue to invest roughly $1 billion every year to update and grow Saskatchewan’s electrical system. We need to make sure our growing province has the power it needs to thrive.”
Officials said SaskPower is expanding generation capacity from approximately 4,500 MW now to 7,000 MW by 2030.
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