Victoria Alarcon and Ayesha Khan
Features & Opinions Editor and Advertising Designer
After a power outage left half of Keele campus in the dark, students and restaurant managers were left asking questions as to what exactly happened to cause the blackout.
At approximately 8:20 p.m. on September 23, power in the Student Centre, York Lanes, and Bethune College and Residence suddenly shut off.
According to assistant vp campus services and business operations Richard Francki, the failure to break off from Toronto Hydro when its voltage supply dropped caused the power outage.
“We have two gas turbine generators that provide up to 10 megawatts of power, and they’re supplemented by Toronto Hydro by the grid,” he explains. “If the grid all of a sudden drops in its supply of voltage—and that’s what happened in this case—the electrical system knocks off the breakers from Toronto Hydro, and then our gas turbine generator is supposed to operate in isolation.”
In this particular case, he says, “something funny” about the drop in voltage caused the generator to shut down.
“At that point we were unable to start it on its own […] what we use is ‘black-starting,’ you know, you’re starting it from black. We were unable to find out why the control system prevented us from starting the generator in isolation from the grid.”
The power outage not only affected students, but also restaurant owners who were unable to operate for the rest of the night. Raymond Chi, manager of The Original Panzerotto and Pizza,
was not pleased with the power failure.
“[I’m] just disappointed. I see [blackouts] happen once every year,” he says.
The owner of the General Store in York Lanes says it was the most severe blackout she had seen during her 13 years at Keele campus, and that nothing like it had happened before on such a scale.
Francki says he too has never heard of any blackout quite like it.
“It’s a little unusual and we’re still trying to [find out what happened],” he says. “We’ve brought in outside help to figure out how the logic behind the control system works so we can find out how in a similar circumstance we’d be able to start the generator.”
Though the power outage made many students and restaurant managers unhappy, not everyone experienced the same level of frustration.
Scott Law, a Second Cup employee, says the night was “probably the best shift we have worked here. Basically everything got shut down, so we just chilled out and listened to music.”
With files from Yuni Kim
