It’s been a dark year for SaskPower customers thanks to storms that have struck Saskatchewan in every season.
The Crown corporation says the number of power outages through the end of June, 2010 is nearly double where it usually is by that point in the year thanks to the year’s intense weather.
"There have been a higher number of outages, period, compared to most years," said SaskPower spokesman James Parker.
"We had that (February) winter storm that knocked out service to Coronach and a bunch of communities there in the southwest. That skews the number somewhat … but we have had a fair amount of thunderstorm activity, a fair amount of lightning, and that increases the number as well."
Typically, at least half of power outages are weather-related, said Parker.
About 30 per cent of power failures are related to lightning striking transformers or conductors, and 20 per cent are due to icing of powerlines and equipment.
Birds, squirrels and other animals are responsible for a further 25 per cent of outages, with the remainder coming from equipment failures, accidents or planned outages.
"Newer equipment is likely more able to withstand extreme weather than older equipment. It only stands to reason. We have aging infrastructure like almost every utility in North America and that can cause problems," said Parker.
Based on a calculation of the total outages experienced by customers divided by the actual number of customer accounts (roughly 450,000), SaskPower’s "system average interruption index" was 1.34 compared to an average 0.77 over the previous 12 years.
No geographic breakdown of where the outages had occurred was available.
The number of customer calls to SaskPower’s outage centre was 159,479 at the end of June compared to 92,755 at the same point last year.
"We want them to call us because a big part of this is, when customers call we have some indication something is wrong and we can fix it," said Parker.
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