As Hydro-Québec continues to scramble to restore power to thousands of customers, some experts are raising questions about the reliability of power grids.
They say transitioning to smart grids and burying power lines should be top priority for the province’s utility company.
It took one day of freezing rain for tree branches to crack under the pressure of ice and fall onto nearby power lines, causing outages for more than one million Hydro-Québec customers.
Normand Mousseau, an energy expert at polytechnique Montréal says it’s unacceptable not much progress has been done since the 1998 ice storm.
“With smart grids we would have had fewer clients losing power because we would have been able to reformat, reorganize the grid much more dynamically,” he said.
“Hydro-Quebec should have started decades ago,” he added.
“The City of Montreal is opening streets all the time. We’ve been redoing the sewer systems, all the aqueduct systems,” said Mousseau.
“That means there is a lot of opportunities. But we missed that. Already we’ve done so many streets in the last 10, 15 years where we have not buried the lines.”
According to Hydro-Québec, though, there is a cost.
“The estimate is for $100 billion to put all of our system underground,” said Lynn St-Laurent, spokesperson for Hydro-Québec.
Only 10 per cent of the network is underground, mainly in newer developments or where municipalities have requested it.
“As an option to prevent the storms our strategy is rather to increase the resilience of the network,” said St-Laurent.
“We’re doubling our investments to our tree pruning programs to make sure that program is more efficient and that the efforts are increased. We feel that that is the best strategy for Quebec.”
She added a hefty price tag for Hydro-Québec, means higher rates for customers. But energy experts disagree.
“Vancouver started in 1969. And the cost of electricity there is not higher than here,” said Mousseau.
“I mean this is bogus to say these costs will have a major impact on the rate.”
As Quebec moves towards green energy and electric cars become more popular, Mousseau says it will be imperative for Hydro-Québec to begin planning ahead rather than playing catch up.