Poplar River Power Station repair cost pegged at $4.9M and counting

After heavy rain and flooding at the SaskPower Poplar River Power Station, the Crown is having to chip in a pretty penny for repairs.

The station, one of the biggest coal-powered plants for SaskPower, was down for more than two months this summer.

A heavy rainfall in early June caused a breach in an earth-berm reservoir upstream from the power station, sweeping rain and debris into the station’s machinery, which had to be shut down.

While the plant was cleaned out, SaskPower had to replace that power load by importing more power from other provinces and by changing operations at other power stations.

The Crown has now pegged the cost of the repairs at $4.9 million, but that’s not the end of it as the costs for replacing the power load have yet to be determined.

The plant, located near Coronach, has the capacity to produce 582 megawatts of power, or about 10 per cent of SaskPower’s coal-generation capacity. The two units were powered on in the early 1980s.