ESTEVAN - SaskPower continued to lean on Unit 4 at the Boundary Dam Power Station (BD4) to meet the province's electrical needs.
Joel Cherry, a media relations and issues management consultant with SaskPower, said Unit 4 was online for 2,853 1/2 hours in 2023, which is equivalent to nearly 119 days, or approximately 32.6 per cent of the year. BD4 was shifted to stand-by status in December 2021.
"A good chunk of that was during the Poplar River Power Station outage," said Cherry, referring to a prolonged shutdown of the facility near Coronach that occurred due to flooding in early June.
"We had high demand because we also had a couple of heat waves coming through during the time Poplar River was down, and so BD4 really helped us backstop our system through that," said Cherry.
BD4 was online for 1,692 hours, or about 70 1/2 days, while Poplar River was down.
SaskPower also turned to Unit 4 during heat waves and cold snaps last year. The extreme cold that the province experienced for much of this month meant Unit 4 had to be pressed back into service.
As of the afternoon of Jan. 17, Unit 4 was producing 60 megawatts of electricity, which was less than its peak years when it supplied 150 megawatts to the grid. Cherry believes the lower output is due to a boiler issue.
"It is getting to the end of its life, certainly, and we're unable to get the full output from it, but that 60 megawatts we're getting out of it is significant. One megawatt … of baseload power is enough to power 1,000 Saskatchewan homes, so it is still providing value to our system," said Cherry.
Since it's an older unit, Cherry said the process of getting Unit 4 fired up again is more manual in nature, and it can take up to 48 hours.
BD4 is slated to remain as a back-up power option until the Great Plains Power Station, a natural gas facility near Moose Jaw comes online, which is slated to happen later this summer. SaskPower had previously projected Great Plains would be operating this March.
"That project is well along, it's 95 per cent completed. We just have to get that facility completed and running, and that's certainly going to happen some time this year," said Cherry.
Unit 5 at Boundary Dam is scheduled to come offline at the end of 2024 and be shifted to stand-by mode "for some time afterward", said Cherry.
