Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank NTPC Minister and their technician staff and contractors for the swift reaction to get into Fort Resolution to restore the power and to keep their homes and community safe. However, my constituents are still wondering why NTPC made the decision to overhaul the generator in Fort Resolution on January 11th, 2025.
Mr. Speaker, my question is to the Minister of NTPC. My question is why did the NTPC staff wait until January 2025 to do their planned generator replacement versus when the preventive maintenance work could have been done probably in the summer or fall time? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh. Minister responsible for NTPC.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And, Mr. Speaker, it was certainly helpful to have lines of communication open when the event was ongoing, so I do thank the Member for being a part of that.
Mr. Speaker, the events that led to this outage were actually routine operations, so it was not related to any maintenance that as a result of the Taltson being offline. It was to switch over one of the units that was overheating. There was a backup unit there available, there were technicians available, and so they really were not anticipating circumstances to become what they were on that day and, certainly, as it again it was noted, were there and were making efforts to bring things back online as quickly as they could. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My second question is in the event of freezing up homes in my community if it was caused by NTPC's lengthy power outage, who is ultimately responsible to pay for the frozen home repairs if that ever happened? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it is standard practice for utilities everywhere in the country that there's not any provisions whereby they would compensate customers who might find themselves in circumstances if they have some damages so there's no difference here with NTPC. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister responsible for NTPC. Member from Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh. Final supplementary.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My third question is in the future, can the NTPC look at maybe doing this type of work in the summer months when it's more appropriate versus when it's in January and February and March? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, Mr. Speaker, with respect to any major works, they certainly do try to consider timing and availability of backups and obviously certainly at some point extreme weather. Again, with routine maintenance, Mr. Speaker, there's a concern that they've been wanting to maintain reliability so not wanting to wait. At this point, we are expecting the Taltson to be back online I think later this month, subject to confirming that. But with that, that obviously provides a pretty significant source of primary power. So, you know, again, understand the concerns and do want to assure the community that we are expecting they'll be back to their usual source of power with diesel being the backup and this, therefore, should not -- they shouldn't be experiencing any similar problems hopefully for the rest of this year. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister responsible for NTPC. Oral questions. Member from Yellowknife Centre.
