Auditor takes aim at Saskpower’s maintenance plan

Pity Saskpower or any government charged with overseeing its long-standing challenges of providing electricity to a sparsely populated province. But after 90 years of accepting such challenges in a place like Saskatchewan, you’d think our Crown electrical utility would have a better-planned maintenance system than just about any electrical utility company anywhere in the world.

Well, it wasn’t just the power outage two weeks ago that underscored how ill-prepared Saskpower is when it comes to meeting that challenge. According to provincial auditor Judy Ferguson’s Volume 2 of her 2018 report released last week, we are not even doing basic maintenance fundamentals needed to deal with pending disasters.

And given the extent of our electrical distribution system and extremes of our weather, the notion that we somehow would not be as prepared for what would seem to be a near certainty in Saskatchewan quickly moves from a provincewide gag to a problem bordering on scandal.

Suspected to have been caused by broken power lines from all that pretty rime frost on the lines after days of fog, it is known that line breaks caused the Boundary, Shand and Poplar River power stations to all trip. “If the system senses instability, it will sometimes cause units like that to trip,” said Saskpower spokesman Jordan Jackle.

Covering a swath from Swift Current to Humboldt to the U.S. border and points in between, the great outage of 2018 hit about 200,000 customers for several hours.

A power outage of this magnitude at this time of year goes well beyond inconvenience to Christmas shoppers or the need to cancel high school or university classes, or even the traffic snarls when the lights go out. At this time of year, a prolonged power outage can, potentially, to turn deadly rather quickly.

Credit Saskpower’s often-maligned workforce for responding the way it did. Notwithstanding how long some people went without electricity in this case, what Saskpower again proved it does rather well is react to a potential crisis. However, what we aren’t very good at, said Ferguson in her report, is doing what we can to stop a potential crisis from happening.

Admittedly, her report wasn’t all negative. Ferguson said “Saskpower has good processes in place to maintain its over one million wooden poles’’ and 94 per cent of its maintenance plan for its poles were completed by last year. The electrical utility was also “adopting a new corporate-wide asset management strategy” and “making changes to better collect the reasons for outages to help it identify whether the condition of its above-ground power distribution assets contributed to or reduced unplanned outages.”

However, her big concern is that Saskpower “had not completed about one-half of the planned preventative maintenance of its other above-ground distribution assets, including some identified as very high priority.”

Yes, this is a challenge in Saskatchewan, where we have 3.5 customer accounts per circuit kilometre compared with the national average of 18. But as Ferguson noted, what that really means is there is “greater pressure on Saskpower to spend its maintenance dollars at the right place and the right time.”

Asked last week how the most recent outage related to the concerns raised in her audit, Ferguson said it was a good question that speaks to the problem, demonstrated by the fact that 34 per cent of Saskpower’s unplanned power outages in the last five years were related to its aging infrastructure.

The auditor’s report conclusions determined that Saskpower has not: “completed formal risk assessment to support its strategies for inspection and preventative maintenance”; “gathered complete information about asset condition”; “formally prioritized maintenance to support a risk-informed allocation of assets”; “formally determined the consequences of not maintaining assets,” or “reported regularly to senior management the consequences of not completing planned maintenance.”

It isn’t easy running a power company here, but shouldn’t a basic maintenance strategy be as fundamental as providing electricity itself ?

This is the least we should expect from our government-owned electrical utility.