Keeping the lights on: SaskPower spending $18.9M in Regina

SaskPower is trying to keep people’s lights on for longer; it’s spending $18.9 million on infrastructure in Regina alone this year.

“As the infrastructure ages, we want to make sure that we’re upgrading that and making sure that, as we provide the new infrastructure, it has the capability to not only provide reliable service but as well it gives us the ability to plan for infrastructure for the future,” Shawn Schmidt, SaskPower’s vice-president of distribution and customer services, said Wednesday.

Shawn Schmidt, vice-president of distribution and customer services with SaskPower. May 22, 2019 (Lisa Schick/980 CJME)

Schmidt explained the program while standing in front of construction already taking place on 11th Avenue near Osler Street. The street and sidewalk are being dug up to expose power and communications lines.

The work being done this summer in Regina includes replacing underground and overheard cables, building new duct banks, changing street lights to LED bulbs, and putting in wildlife guards on transformers.

About a third of outages SaskPower deals with are related to animals, including one of the two outages in Regina on Tuesday night.

The wildlife guards being installed will cover parts of transformers, making sure that if an animal lands or crawls across it, there’s enough insulation so that it won’t cause a shortcircuit.

Schmidt said much of the infrastructure in Regina was built in the 1960s and even earlier, so it needs to be upgraded.

The $18.9 million being spent in Regina this year is a little higher than normal, and the work in downtown Regina is one of the biggest projects the company is embarking on.

“With the duct bank work that we’re doing and the underground cable replacement in the downtown core, we’re really focusing on improving the infrastructure in the downtown core, so there’s a bit more work to be done,” said Schmidt.

Ground shifting

Some of that $18.9 million will be used to install 3,000 expansion boxes for the power boxes on houses in Regina.

SaskPower has been working on the project for a few years to mitigate the problems ground shifting can cause. In summer 2017, a dry summer caused ground shifting, which pulled some boxes away from houses and, in some cases, caused fires.

Schmidt said SaskPower isn’t especially worried this year, as the start to the season seems to suggest another dry summer.

He explained the company has identified the areas of concern and is continuing with the replacement plan.