With the help of the federal government, ENWIN Utilities is installing new self-healing grid technology to reduce outage times and increase reliability.
The technology allows engineers to quickly identify and localize issues and restore power to unaffected users.
"Effectively what it's going to do is create automation to greatly shorten the duration of power outages and to automatically isolate where the problem actually is instead of us having to go out and patrol and investigate," said Chris Taylor, vice president of business development for ENWIN.
The self-healing grid automated feeder ring project will cost $1.6 million. The Ministry of Natural Resources gave ENWIN $800,000 toward the project costs.
Construction on the upgrades is already underway. The focus of the project will be the area of the city most vulnerable to power outages.
"It's more the downtown core where we're seeing more of the reliability concerns, so we're targeting those feeders that have the bigger reliability concerns and moving from there," said Taylor.
The entire project is expected to be complete by 2025.
