Frigid weekend led to high demand for power on P.E.I., but no need for rotating outages

Cold weekend weather brought a high demand for power across Prince Edward Island, though Maritime Electric says it didn't need to resort to rolling blackouts to ease the strain on the province's electrical grid.

The cold snap forced people indoors and had municipalities and the province preparing for the worst, setting up warming shelters and reception centres as temperatures dropped to around -20 C.

Maritime Electric spokesperson Kim Griffin said the cold brought plenty of interest to the utility's online Grid Status Index tool, which launched last week.

“There were certainly a lot of concerned people, including our customers,” she said, noting the website had more than 70,000 views over the weekend.

Maritime Electric said power usage hit one of the highest numbers on record in the province — 404 megawatts at its peak, which is how much electricity Islanders are using at one time.

But the Grid Status Index never left the "watch" stage, which means Islanders should prepare for the possibility of being asked to conserve electricity. 

But there were no rotating power outages, something Griffin attributed partly to sun and wind power generation over the weekend.

“We had forecasted last week what load was going to look like, how much wind we were going to have, and our forecast tool worked and held up," she said.

Griffin said people she spoke with over the past few days were doing their part to conserve energy, and were keeping an eye on the index.

The province did experience two outages on Sunday — one affecting around 3,800 customers for about an hour in Prince County and another resulting in 430 customers without power in the East Royalty area of Charlottetown for about 45 minutes.

Griffin said neither was a rotating outage. An issue at Maritime Electric’s Albany substation caused the Prince County outage, while the Charlottetown outage was caused by a blown fuse.

She said Maritime Electric would use multiple channels to inform customers about the need for rotating outages an hour or two before a non-emergency scenario. 

“If there's one thing I would really like our customers to know is that if we are in a rotating outage scenario, we will do our best to notify them," Griffin said.