Lengthy power outages that have left some Quebecers in the dark for days have exposed the province’s lack of preparedness for the green energy transition to come, an expert said Wednesday.
The province needs to improve its infrastructure and emergency planning, as Quebec society increasingly replaces fossil fuels with electricity to reach emissions targets, Normand Mousseau, scientific director of the Institut de l’énergie Trottier at Polytechnique Montreal, said in an interview.
On Wednesday afternoon, more than 14,000 Hydro-Québec customers were still without power, about five days after a winter storm slammed Eastern Canada. The public utility’s outage map showed more than 4,600 clients without electricity in the Quebec City area, as well as about 2,300 in the Cote-Nord region and roughly 1,800 in Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean.
The lengthy outage “shows to what point we remain fragile and we aren’t prepared,” he said. Mousseau, who is also a physics professor at Université de Montreal, added that the impact of outages will only worsen as the province’s reliance on electricity grows.
“People were going into their cars to warm up during the night or for a few hours, but when we’ll all have electric cars we won’t be able to do that,” he said.
READ MORE: ‘Working day and night’: 15,000 people still in dark following Quebec winter storm
Trottier said Hydro-Québec should consider a program to gradually bury more of its power lines, when it makes sense to do so. The province should also develop a “real plan for resilience” that could include installing powerful batteries in certain areas to maintain some electricity when power lines go down, he said.
An auditor general’s report in December found that Hydro-Québec’s service has become less reliable and that the provincial Crown corporation isn’t fully equipped to handle the challenges associated with an aging grid. The report found that the average length of outages increased 63 per cent between 2012 and 2021, when major weather events were excluded.
An $800-million plan launched in 2020 to reduce the number of service interruptions has been only partially carried out, the report found.
Hydro-Quebec CEO Sophie Brochu told reporters on Monday that it was extreme weather — not weaknesses in the grid — that caused hundreds of thousands of Quebecers to lose power at the height of the storm that began in the province Dec. 23.
“Put any equipment in front of 120-kilometre winds and we’d be exactly in the same situation,” she said.
READ MORE: Canadians still feeling effects from winter storm amid delayed flights, power outages
The utility, Brochu added, has also launched a program to catch up on years of under-maintenance of the infrastructure, including to cut trees and other vegetation near transmission lines.
Hydro-Quebec has promised that the vast majority of customers would have their power restored by the end of Wednesday, but it has also said it couldn’t provide an end date for all the outages.
Mousseau said the auditor general’s report clearly showed that Hydro-Quebec has underinvested in the maintenance of equipment. He said the utility has used cost as an excuse to resist burying power lines. The utility should take the opportunity to bury lines when streets are open for road work, he added.
However, he said the government lacks general mitigation and crisis management strategies that would protect citizens during outages, adding that Hydro-Québec can’t be blamed for the province’s failures.
As an example, he said, better land-use planning could reduce urban sprawl and ensure power infrastructure is easier for crews to reach; as well, he said, the Public Security Department could develop a more detailed plan to get people emergency power and heat.
He said it’s up to municipalities, the province and Hydro-Quebec to get together and develop a real strategy to ensure Quebecers aren’t left in the dark and cold.
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