BOYLE – Village of Boyle councillors were prepared for their yearly report from FortisAlberta, the power company that keeps the lights on in the village and surrounding county.
Dora L’Heureux, a stakeholder relations manager at the company, made the drive out from St. Albert for the Feb. 21 meeting, where she brought up the 2022 data on power outages, electrical safety, and a few fun facts about the company across the province.
“We have over 128,000 kilometres of power line, which is enough to wrap around the world three times,” said L’Heureux. “We also deliver 17,000 gigawatts of electricity. To put that in perspective, when Dr. Emmett Brown was going to give the DeLorean enough electricity to jump back in time, he used 1.21 gigawatts, so that tells you how much power we generate.”
Boyle councillors didn’t have many village-specific questions, noting the strength of the service in their community. Fortis measures its reliability on two indexes: system average interruption duration (SAIDI) and system average interruption frequency (SAIFI). In 2022, the provincial SAIDI average was 1.70, the national average was 8.33, and Boyle’s was at 0.46. The SAIFI numbers tell a similar story — Boyle sits at a 0.29 score on the index, while the province sits at 1.08 and the federal number is 2.63.
“We rock here in Boyle compared to the rest of our service territory,” said L’Heureux, eliciting a laugh from around the table. Fortis serviced 609 sites in the village in 2022, including 473 residential properties and 107 general service sites.
While the data didn’t include 2023, L’Heureux’s presentation said the only major outage in Boyle in 2022 was caused by lightning June 29, 2022, which interrupted 45 customers for a total of 62 hours. The largest interruption shown was from July 31, 2019, where foreign interference — think falling trees or bird strikes instead of international spying — knocked out power for 137 customers over 409 hours.
High energy prices
With Alberta’s energy prices consistently growing over the last two years — rates were around eight to ten cents per kilowatt in 2021, and peaked at $0.36 in 2023, according to Epcor — L’Heureux said it was important to monitor the flat rate, as well as make sure your property was signed up with competitive retail.
“It’s important to educate yourself right now, if you are not signed up with a competitive retail, your power (rate) fluctuates once a month depending on the regulated rate option,” said L’Heureux, who said the list of competitive retailers could be found on the Utility Consumer Advocate’s website.
Fiscal protection wasn’t the only way L’Heureux encouraged people to take care of themselves; Fortis had 314 cases of electrical contacts in 2022. She said while that number was down from 2021, when the company had 539 across the province, it was still more than anyone wanted to see.
“One is too many when you think of what could happen with a potential contact with an electrical line,” said L’Heureux, who said Fortis does offer hazard safety classes for municipalities.
She also encouraged council to take the time to re-familiarize themselves with electrical safety, noting Hollywood often got it wrong when it comes to potentially dangerous situations.
“Sometimes I’m watching TV and I’ll see something happen and go, ‘That is not right!’”
L’Heureux pointed to the Utility Safety Partners, a provincial non-profit, as an example of a resource people could use to locate utilities before they dig.
Future growth in the area
“Our system planning department in Airdrie works at the whole system all the time, and they do a ten-year projection to make sure the prospective growth we have is what we have in our substations,” said L’Heureux. “You guys are looking good in this area, but if you have any prospective industry let us know as soon as possible.”
Electric vehicles (EV) were another topic of discussion; Fortis introduced an EV rate in 2022, and while the technology isn’t truly northern Alberta-ready yet, they’ve seen some buy-in in other parts of the province.
“It’s all over the place right now, but it really seems to be an urban phenomenon right now,” said mayor Colin Derko. “We travel a lot more in rural, we had a guy in here for a (presentation) with an electric vehicle and he said he couldn’t drive it out here. It really is something to use around town still right now.”
