Albertans asked to reduce power consumption
Posted Jul 10, 2012 7:43 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A day after a series of rolling brownouts to ease demand on the province’s electricity grid, people are being encouraged to turn off unnecessary appliances, close blinds and shades and limit their use of air conditioning.
Monday afternoon, six of the province’s power plants went off-line; with the system unable to keep up with demand for electricity, the decision was made to implement a number of rolling brownouts.
The outages in Calgary not only impacted homes and businesses, but knocked out traffic lights at a number of intersections.
There was also a power outage on the Stampede Midway, shutting down the Skyride for a time.
Calgary Liberal MLA Kent Hehr tells 660News people upset about the lack of juice should take out their frustration on the Tory government, which decided more than a decade ago to deregulate the province’s electricity system.
Hehr says plans might be in the works to build a new multi-billion dollar north-south power transmission line in Alberta, but that won’t fix the power problems of here and now.
