January broke cold weather and energy consumption records: SaskEnergy

This past week wasn’t just cold – it was cold enough to break records.

A major drop in temperatures last week caused energy consumption to jump up for people on the Prairies.

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This January’s energy consumption levels have already broken last year’s record, said Doyle Fox, a senior communications officer with SaskEnergy.

“I can confirm that on Jan. 22 we did hit a new peak day record with 1.72 petajoules consumed and that broke the previous record of 1.7 petajoules per day, which occurred on Jan. 12, 2024,” he said.

When it comes to what caused that high energy consumption, Fox said he thinks a lot of those main contributors to that record were power generation and residential heating.

“I think those are the two main contributing factors that kind of drove that new record,” said Fox.

A standard, single-family home in Saskatchewan generally consumes around 100 gigajoules of natural gas annually.

There are 1,000,000 gigajoules in one petajoule.

Fox said breaking records could have happened a few times last week.

“On Jan. 23 we hit 1.71 petajoules per day. And on Jan. 24 we had 1.70 petajoules per day. So that kind of, obviously met or broke the previous record of Jan. 12, 2024, which was 1.70 petajoules per day,” he said.

On Jan. 22 when the record was broken, temperatures in Saskatoon reached -49 C with the windchill. Meanwhile Regina saw a similar dip in temperatures in that city with it reaching -47 C with the windchill.