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COMMENTARY: We can do more – we have to

Summerside Mayor Dan Kutcher says city must be allowed to take on more electrical capacity

The structural weaknesses in P.E.I.’s electrical system should concern every Islander.

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Last winter, Maritime Electric’s Sherbrooke Station transformer failed. The consequences were immediate. Maritime Electric could not carry enough electricity to serve Western P.E.I. without cutting off Summerside and Cavendish Farms, which is what happened.

Summerside was stranded by the Sherbrooke failure, unable to get the electricity we buy from NB Power to our hospitals, schools, businesses, and homes. For two weeks, residents and businesses stepped up, reducing power use, while we ran every backup generator at extraordinary cost.

Initially, Maritime Electric indicated they would only be able to transmit 2MW of electricity to Summerside. Our winter load is approximately 35MW. Even with all our assets in play, rolling blackouts were the most likely outcome, and Maritime could not say how long repairs would take. I pulled every lever available to find a solution, while our team got to work to find our own.

The pressure worked. Maritime Electric reconfigured transmission lines to deliver between 9MW and 32MW over the following weeks. Our team got creative and the weather co-operated – wind and solar farms, battery storage and diesel generators kept the lights on, hospital open and hockey practices uninterrupted. Our community found a way through a major system failure, and our utility proved flexible and capable under pressure. Months later, when it was all over and........

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