Beginning May 1, SaskPower crews will be upgrading electrical equipment in downtown Regina to improve overall power reliability.
“SaskPower has a number of projects planned for Regina’s downtown over the coming months,” said Nidal Dabghi, SaskPower’s acting vice-president of distribution and customer services. “Some of the underground infrastructures in this area is more than 50 years old. Replacing and modernizing this aging equipment will go a long way towards ensuring safe and reliable service for customers in that area.”
SaskPower has invested $28 million on the downtown Regina infrastructure project since it began in 2012, and plans to invest an estimated $9 million on projects scheduled for 2018.
This year’s work will be happening in a number of downtown locations in the Queen City. Crews will be updating equipment installed on overhead lines and replacing some existing power poles.
Crews also plan to focus on underground facilities and plan to renew and replace 800 metres of duct bank that houses underground power lines, as well as installing new switches and other equipment.
The project also involves a general inspection of the Queen City’s underground infrastructure in order to plan for future work.
All of this is intended to improve reliability, and in the event of an outage, will allow SaskPower to diagnose the problem and restore power more quickly, the utility says.
SaskPower has confirmed that some preliminary work has already been done, but the bulk of the work will begin May 1 and will stretch to the end of the year.
“Though there will likely still be some temporary inconveniences like short outages and road restrictions, we are taking steps to keep disruptions to a minimum,” said Dabghi. “We’ll also do our best to inform our customers about the impacts of the work ahead of time.”
For more information on the locations for this project or any other SaskPower construction projects, go to their website.