During the recent heatwave, you probably used whatever means were available to you to keep cool, including keeping your air conditioner cranked as temperatures crept into heat warning levels. As it turns out, you and the rest of Saskatchewan set a record by doing so. 

As temperatures rose, so did power consumption across Saskatchewan and indeed across most of Western Canada. The end result, in Saskatchewan, was SaskPower customers breaking records for how much power they used in that time. 

"There was certainly a significant increase in our peak load demand," said SaskPower spokesperson Scott McGregor. "We actually broke the summertime record that had been standing for the past three years or so. The previous record was set in August of 2018 and on June 30, right around suppertime, we broke it by about 23 megawatts, a big grand total of 3547 megawatts."

Though SaskPower doesn't know for absolute certain, McGregor agreed this was most likely due to the increased use of air conditioners and other cooling units to try and stave off the heat. This, on top of regular usage on any given day, was enough to push it over the top. 

"We did see an increase from, we assume, fans and air conditioners and other means of keeping people cool and households cool," he said. "Definitely to be expected with how hot it was out there."

Following that, some people will likely see an increase in their power bill. In order to keep yours lower the next time another heatwave sinks in; SaskPower has some advice beyond the usual bits of keeping your blinds closed. 

"One of the big things is to make sure you're only heating or cooling your house when you're there," McGregor said. "There's no point in running your air conditioner at full bore when you're not even home. If you've gone to the lake for the weekend, there's no point in keeping your home at 18 degrees. If you can invest in a programable thermostat or smart thermostat, that certainly is going to help. Heating or cooling takes up about a quarter of your power bill every month."

In other parts of North America where the heat was even more severe, some places saw heat so powerful it actually melted cable casings or otherwise ruined power infrastructure. In Saskatchewan, however, that's not going to happen. 

"Our physical infrastructure isn't in any danger from extreme heat," said McGregor. "We will see some generation capacity at our thermal generation units not be as efficient as it normally is, just with the ambient temperature the reaction isn't as strong. The biggest thing we saw with the crazy heat we saw was an increase in load demand."

McGregor added there were some brief unplanned outages up north due to system overload as people put pressure on the grid, but nothing too serious.