Nelson Hydro says the Tuesday, July 9th, power outage was the result of upgrades currently underway at the Mill Street Substation.
Nelson Hydro General Manager Scott Spencer said crews responded to the outage, which affected many customers in the City of Nelson and the North Shore, just after 6 p.m.
It took around 1.5 hours to restore power.
He said the outage occurred during the Phase 1 commissioning process of the Mill Street Substation upgrades, which have been underway since September 2023.
Last week, Nelson Hydro completed commissioning one transformer, the full electronic house, all the breakers, switchgears, and controls, which Spencer said are fully operational and functioning well.
During the final phase of commissioning Tuesday afternoon, it was discovered that the electronic protection settings were set too low, leading to a circuit trip during peak consumption hours.
“The circuit tripped functioned as it should have, but it was just set too low for the load that day, so we have made the adjustment, and we won’t have that problem again,” said Spencer.
Crews are now disassembling and removing the equipment from the old substation and constructing Phase 2 in preparation for the second transformer coming in Fall 2024.
Spencer said the project is on track to be completed by the fall and assures customers that Nelson Hydro has a safe and reliable system and that they will do their best to ensure the power stays on, especially with the hot weather.
“We always try to make sure the system is reliable and have gone to great lengths to ensure that we don’t have any disruption to the customers. It’s one of the reasons why we broke the project up into two phases, so that we could maintain continuous service to all the customers.
Things do happen during commissioning or transition into new equipment that we do our best to mitigate, but we do not anticipate that there’ll be further disruptions.”
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