Electricity utility talks about copper theft, data centres during recent tour in Sault Ste. Marie

So this is our TS2, or we call it our Tarantaurus transmission stations. It's one of two. Again, so part of our routine here is we do weekly checks. We come in here and do sub-checks weekly. Our weekly checks, basically we're looking for copper theft, any safety concerns, and any obviously equipment malfunctions that happened over the weekend. And then we also do more in-depth monthly checks we're having a real big challenge right now with copper theft inside our substations the one big takeaway is it's a safety concern for not only the public but our staff who are coming on site this is under full 24 7 video surveillance we do see when people when people are trying to access the property we send we have live monitoring on it we do send the the authorities here because at the end of the day it's not just the the cost to repair it people that are coming in don't don't typically understand the hazards they're putting themselves into and the hazards that the safety issues that they might put our staff into as well. So we've invested significantly into our video surveillance to try to prevent that. As you can see across the road that's Hydro One so they're the they're the utility that provide us with our power. So these are 115 kV transmission lines coming in to our incoming overhead switches so you see these devices here above you. These are motor operated switches. They allow us to isolate ourselves from not only Hydro One, but if we're working on pieces of equipment we need a visual open point so that the staff can get hands-on and do work safely. Lots of unique technology going on. I know it looks like old infrastructure but behind the scenes and when we go take a look inside there's a lot of technology in play that kind of tell what each piece of equipment needs to do. In regards to a data center from a PUC perspective the data center is considered no different than than any other customer. They come to us and they apply for for a connection. If you're talking about PUC distribution we only have the capacity to service smaller customers and in regards to 20 maybe 30 megawatt customers to the max. When you get into like a 400 megawatt data center or any customer of that of that size they would apply through the ISO and that and then PUC transmission who's local here would have an opportunity to connect those those data centers but again going right back to it all we can from a regulatory side of things PUC distribution considers it a a typical customer connection that we have to have to balance with any other customer that connects to our applies to connect to our system if we don't have the capacity to allow these customers not only a data center or say it was another steel plant if we don't have the capacity for them to connect, obviously they wouldn't be able to.