How will Summerside’s solar farm fire impact power this winter?

Summerside now has no solar battery capacity to store the power the city generates. Earlier this year, a battery fire burned for weeks at the city's solar farm. The cause is still unknown, but the city's CAO says that means they can't rely on battery power this winter. The use of our battery has been more focused over the last few years on essentially keeping the lights on and dealing with peak demand versus cost savings. So yeah, it's certainly going to take five megawatts of our dispatchable power away for this winter. It could take two years to replace the battery, but Summerside isn't giving up on the technology. Over the last couple of years, our team has really found significant value in having that battery. An expert in the technology says lithium-ion fires like the one that happened in Summerside are becoming more rare. We were hearing about Fires and laptops and cell phones, which now has become incredibly rare. And that's because the lithium ion battery industry has learned to improve safety in the batteries for those devices over time. And the same thing is happening in grid energy storage containers as well. Last winter, Summerside warned about rolling blackouts. That was due to a Maritime Electric equipment failure at its Sherbrooke substation, which supplies the city with electricity. DeRocier says a new agreement with Maritime Electric should fill the gap. It was determined that Maritime Electric was able to provide us what is called conditional firm. Sherbrooke is likely reusing older equipment that may not be in the condition that we'd all hope. So that may put us in a scenario where we move from firm to conditional firm in case that equipment were to fail. CBC requested an interview with Maritime Electric on the details of that agreement, but no one was made available. DeRocier says the agreement for conditional firm power isn't a long-term one. He says Summerside still hopes to secure its own subsea cable to the mainland and become a more independent utility. Tony Davis, CBC News, Summerside.