Poplar River power station offline for two months

Through the past two months, which featured multiple storms, heat waves and a power usage record, SaskPower has been without 10 per cent of its generating capacity.

The Poplar River coal-fired power station near Coronach has been offline since the beginning of June.

According to SaskPower spokesperson Scott McGregor, around June 2 there was heavy rain in the area that caused a breach in an earth berm reservoir upstream.

“(That) caused a large amount of hay, mud and other debris to wash into the plant and get sucked up into a lot of the internal workings – a lot of the cooling systems and so on,” he explained. “The amount of debris that was pulled into our system was substantial and so we’ve had crews working around the clock since to flush all of the hay and the mud and so on out of the system.”

McGregor said as workers keep flushing the system, they keep finding debris that has been pushed through different screens and other controls.

He said SaskPower is hoping it will be back up and running in the next couple weeks.

Poplar River is not a small plant – it has a power generation capacity of 582 megawatts, which is more than a third of SaskPower’s conventional coal generation capacity and about 10 per cent of its total generating capacity.

To fill that gap, McGregor said SaskPower has had to make some adjustments, particularly through the heatwaves which put extra demand on power.

He said one of the big things is the company has been pushing off plant maintenance where they can to make sure the other stations are operating a full capacity.

SaskPower has also been maximizing the importing of power from other provinces and letting customers know about ways they can reduce their power consumption. McGregor said SaskPower has also asked some corporate customers to lower their power demands, where those types of agreements are in place.

McGregor said he didn’t know of any concerns that SaskPower wouldn’t be able to fulfil power needs.

“We do what we can to make sure that our customers never experience any sort of impact to reliability, whether that be from power stations coming offline or inclement weather or anything like that,” said McGregor.

SaskPower wasn’t willing to say what the cost of the situation has been until the plant is back in operation.