How reliable is Yukon's electricity?

Yukon is one of the few jurisdictions in Canada that is not connected to the North American power transmission grid. That means when there are power outages, we can’t rely on our neighbours to help get the lights back on. On the flip side, our outages are shorter than the national average because we have a back-up diesel system that most utilities don’t have. This allows us to bring the power back on fairly quickly (within an hour or two in most cases).

Nonetheless, the bottom line is that electricity in Yukon needs to be reliable so that Yukoners can continue to pursue their day-to-day lives.

We take our responsibility to provide reliable power very seriously. In 2009, we embarked on an aggressive capital maintenance schedule that saw approximately two-thirds of our core capital budget go towards reliability projects.

The result is that we have seen significant improvements in some areas. For example in 2009, there were seven major controllable outages in the southern Yukon as compared to 17 in 2008.

However we recognize we need to do even better, particularly in the northern part of the territory. We are working hard to reduce outages by replacing older equipment and assets, both on the generation and the transmission side of things.