INUVIK - The CEO and president of the Northwest Territories Power Corporation apologized to town council for the five power outages Inuvik suffered at the end of 2010, during the committee of the whole meeting this week.

David Axford provided town council with a detailed report of the outages on Sept. 28, Oct. 8, Nov. 4, Nov. 16 and Dec. 23, which varied in length from an hour and a half to 13 hours. While the number of outages in 2010 ranked fewer than other years, the severity, length and number of total outages outranked other years.

"The length of outages were way out of the ballpark and totally unacceptable," Axford said. "There are a number of things we are implementing to deal with the process and we fully expect the number of outages to go down. We expect to never have a repeat of 2010. We should never repeat 2010 in terms of duration and that depends on us."

In 2010, customers in Inuvik went without power for a total of 24 hours between September and December. From 2003 to 2009, the town had usually less than five hours of outages per year, and not more than 10.

NTPC met with town council in early February and made a commitment to investigate the causes of the outages.

On June 20, Axford presented a detailed report on the causes for each outage and recommendations to ensure Inuvik can expect better electrical service, as well as the implementation plan for those improvements.

Inuvik is powered by two generation plants. K Plant has three natural gas reciprocating engines called Wartsilas. The EMD plant has four diesel reciprocating engines by EMD, Cummins and Caterpillar. Five feeders supply energy to Inuvik.

According to Axford, the first major power outage on Sept. 28 was caused by an improperly installed valve, inexperienced staff with inadequate supervision, lack of procedures and checks and insufficient technical resources on site to overcome equipment failures. The valve led to excessive pipe vibration and a loss of coolant caused the outage – basically the plant overheated.

The other four outages were results of this first one, compounded by miscommunication, a lack of formal procedures for communicating changes between operations and engineering departments, operators under pressure and making decisions without considering implications, as well as technical errors such as computer card failures, gas engines tripping and a lack of back-up equipment.

"We're not casting blame on operators," Axford said. "There was insufficient training for locals and insufficient technical resources."

Solutions for the problems include having consistent and formal procedures, improving communications, improving skills through improved training, hiring experienced technologists and engineers, implementing maintenance programs, improving the pick-up characteristics of gas engines and considering installing other engines.

The power corp. suffers from the same affliction as other Northern companies – recruiting southerners who don't stay or lack Northern experience. Axford hopes to change that by hiring and training local people.

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