Keeping a Canadian community’s lights on

One of Canada’s largest utility companies, sought to replace the 91km of electrical transmission lines in the Ontario community of Petawawa. The lines had originally been built in the 1940s, so in the interest of increasing power efficiency and reliability, the utility decided full-scale replacement was the best option. Project execution would consist of six phases, spanning three years, involving install of 28 new composite structures and shield wires and also restringing conductors. A significant challenge of this project was the prospect of keeping all customers powered for the duration without interruption. Several approaches were considered – from load transfer, to multiple outages, to building a by-pass or setting up a temporary grid on demand. With any of these solutions, there were several key risks to mitigate:

• A radial feed with zero

• Losing the reliability and customer satisfaction for which the utility company is recognized

• Delaying the project due to the regulatory approval process of construction projects

Ultimately, the goal was to find the right solution to keep Petawawa powered while the Utility Company completed its capital grid hardening program as quickly as possible to achieve in-service agreement (ISA) goals and minimize customer impact.

The large utility company chose Aggreko for its engineering experience, industry knowledge, and previous successful projects, both locally and globally. While the large utility company completed the grid hardening program, Aggreko kept the Petawawa community and its surrounding key customers powered without interruption.

In partnership with the large utility company, Aggreko designed a grid-on-demand solution, which included mobile generation from two distribution stations that provided electricity to the whole community of Petawawa, powering almost 10,000 customers, for 17 consecutive days. The total installed capacity was 34.5 MW for a 24/7 operation. Rather than a year of planned intermittent outages that would greatly disturb residents, businesses, and critical energy and government operations, Aggreko’s solution enabled the large utility company to complete their work in one 17-day session with minimal service interruption.

This partnership with Aggreko allowed the large utility company to achieve all its goals during an important project to modernize and harden Petawawa’s grid without compromising its two main objectives: providing a long-term, reliable source of energy and keeping customers online and satisfied. Aggreko is proud to enable T&D utilities to become more reliable, resilient, and capital productive, regardless of the challenges they face.