Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro says the power outage earlier today that left over 100,000 customers without power was due to an issue with the Maritime Link.

Rob Collett, who is the VP of engineering with NL Hydro, says the problem began when lines of communication were knocked down between the NL and Nova Scotia ends of the link.

Collett says there is a procedure for such an instance. The unit was brought down to zero megawatts, and the Labrador-Island Link was ramped down as well.

While this was happening, he says the operators in Nova Scotia sent the system into an idle mode. Because of the communications issues that were happening, the two sides weren’t coordinated and the system started exporting power at full output to Nova Scotia. Collett says the system in this province couldn’t handle a swing of that magnitude and they had to start shedding customers.

Collett says the Nova Scotia end of the system detected the anomaly and suddenly stopped the export too, resulting in a loss of generation.

He states about 129,000 customers lost power because of the situation, and it took about an hour to get everyone back online.

Collett says they have been working closely with Nova Scotia to understand exactly what happened. He states that they have an operational fix and their Nova Scotia colleagues will engineer a solution.

When asked what the likelihood is of such a situation ever happening again, Collett had this response.

“Zero. This issue has been fixed forevermore in terms of this particular issue…These links have such massive power flows that they can seriously impact our island. So every time this happens, we had one a couple of weeks ago – and we’ll have an engineering solution for that. There’s an engineering solution for this as well. As frustrating as they are, they do make the system more reliable because we can put engineering solutions in place.”