Power outage affecting thousands of customers in central, western P.E.I.

PEIThousands are without electricity Tuesday evening as a result of an outage affecting large portions of P.E.I.’s Prince and Queens counties.City of Summerside says issue is a result of failure at Maritime Electric’s Sherbrooke substationOver 27,000 Maritime Electric customers from North Cape to Charlottetown were without power Tuesday night. (Kirk Pennell/CBC)More than 14,000 customers are without electricity as of 9:10 p.m. Tuesday as the result of an outage affecting large portions of P.E.I.’s Prince and Queens counties.For a short period of time, as many as 27,000 customers were without power. According to Maritime Electric’s outage map, areas affected span from as far west as North Cape to the Charlottetown area, with some scattered outages also reported in Kings County.A spokesperson for Maritime Electric said crews have been dispatched to determine the cause of the outage and restore power. The city of Summerside, which operates its own electric utility, said in a social media post just before 9 p.m. that the entire city and some surrounding areas are also experiencing an outage.”Our team has identified that the current power outage affecting Summerside and surrounding areas is a result of a failure at the Maritime Electric Sherbrooke Substation. We are deploying our generators to critical locations within our city to temporarily re-energize some areas,” reads the post. “There is no current time of power restoration to the entire City.” A failure at the Sherbrooke substation, located just north of Summerside, led to significant power challenges back in February. As a result, residents were asked to conserve electricity and a mobile transformer had to be brought in from Newfoundland to stabilize the system. Summerside Electric generates about 60 per cent of its electricity through renewable sources like solar and wind, but it still relies on Maritime Electric’s transmission grid for power that the smaller utility purchases from New Brunswick.