An electrical substation failure northwest of Regina had thousands of people in the city without power during the morning of May 3.
“This came to us at 6:15 a.m. CT that there was an outage. We had power restored to everyone by 7:40 a.m,” SaskPower spokesperson Jordan Jackle said.
Jackle said thousands experienced the outage.
The specifics of the substation’s issues aren’t known at this time.
“We are still in the process of investigating the exact cause. We do know that there was a line trip that caused the substation then to trip,” he said.
“We were out there looking to diagnose the problem and fix it, both as quickly and as safely as possible.”
WATCH BELOW: SaskPower announces first utility-scale solar project
When it comes to how often power outages occur, Jackle said they are occurring more often now, and there are a few reasons why.
“We divide the causes into three different camps – they’re caused by weather, aging infrastructure — that is something we’re working to fix, we’re spending about a billion dollars a year to both grow and improve our grid across the province, – and the other part is wildlife.
Jackle said aging infrastructure in the province is an issue that they’re aware of and said the billion dollar investment is being used to “ensure we have the equipment needed to provide safe and reliable power to our customers for years to come.”
A substation is a part of an electrical generation, transmission, and distribution system and they are usually unattended, relying on data and supervisory control.