DISTRIBUTED GENERATION CASE STUDY

Testing Crucial Backup Generators for Northern Communities

Extreme weather, minimal infrastructure and limited road access are just a few of the reasons that remote northern communities need reliable power. These same factors make providing that power particularly challenging.

In the Northwest Territories, the organization tasked with ensuring that communities have the power they need is the Northwest Territories Power Corporation. Serving 33 communities spread out over largely untouched 1.1 million square kilometers (many of which don’t have year-round road access), the NTPC is not your average power company.

Because many of the communities serviced by the NTPC rely on diesel generators to power their homes, electronics and telecommunication infrastructure, ensuring these generators and their backups are running optimally is essential.

That’s where our client comes in.

The Client: A Customer-Centred Construction Company With Many Specialties

Founded over 20 years ago, this client offers a wide variety of general contracting and engineering services to clients across many sectors. They offer a flexible, customer-centered approach, with the goal of doing excellent work and fostering lasting relationships.

From greenfield water treatment facilities, to bridges, to designing substations for mining operations, this client is no stranger to large projects in remote locations.

They came to Trinity because we were the only vendor that could provide all the equipment they needed to test the generators at one of NTPC’s generation facilities.

The Challenge: A Timeline With No Room for Errors

With the winter months approaching, our client was contracted to ensure a power generation facility in a northern community in the Northwest Territories was ready to handle the load.

Not only did our client require a variety of equipment to carry out their testing, they were dealing with some challenging shipping logistics: because the community is reached mainly by air and water in the summer and an ice road in the winter, the equipment would have to be brought in on a barge that only runs four times during the summer months. There was no room for error in the timing of delivery.

Our Approach: A complete Solution In One Place

Because of the precision required in shipping, our client was looking for a vendor that could supply everything they needed; organizing multiple vendors would have added complexity — and more room for error — to the equation.

Thanks to our large supplier network, and our extensive in-house fleet, we were able to provide all the equipment our client needed, keeping things clean and simple for them.

We provided 80 feet of 5kV 3 conductor cable, a 15kV fused disconnect, a 2500KVA 4160V-480V oil-filled transformer and a 2000kW resistive load bank — all ready exactly when they needed it.

The Result: A Northern Community Is Ready for Winter

Thanks to the Trinity team’s timely and comprehensive solution, our client was able to get the equipment they needed, ship it when they needed to, and do the testing they needed to ensure that NTPC’s customers in that community won’t go without power this winter.