Q&A with energy expert: are power outages happening more often in Quebec?

Thursday’s snowstorm caused a massive power outage, leaving hundreds of thousands of Quebecers off the grid. Similar to last year on April 5, when an ice storm hit the province and knocked off power for over a million Hydro-Québec customers at the peak.

CityNews sat down with Éloïse Edom, a research associate at the Institut de l’energie Trottier at Polytechnique.

How does a power outage happen?

“There may be a different reason that causes this kind of outage, for example, malfunction of old equipment. But one of the more frequent reasons or the more frequent cause of this kind of outage are trees that are touching the electric lines.”

Are they happening more often? And if they are, does that impact the overall resilience of the power grid in a region?

“Due to the change in terms of climate conditions, we can see also change in weather conditions. And we can see the kind of snow storms, we can see today, happening more and more often. You have also high storms that also are happening more often. And all these kind of events have huge impact on our system, our electrical grid. Because you have snow that is accumulating on the lines, on the trees. Then you have some branches that just broke from the trees, then that broke the electric lines. And when you have this kind of event at the level of the province, then you have the electricity distributor, such as Hydro-Québec, has a lot of work to do to the repairs needed. So yes, it is impacting the regions and it is happening more and more often.”

What needs to be done to improve the situation and reduce power outages?

“There’s maybe some upgrades that should be done on the grid to modernize some of the equipment. You have also the possibility to bury some of the lines. It is quite common to speak of this kind of solution at each storm that we can see here in Quebec. But well, it’s not a magic solution. So not all the grid can be buried. There is improvement in terms of how fast we can deploy this kind of solution. And well, maybe also develop some level of resilience at the level of the customers. So maybe more better insulated places, apartment houses, so the impact on people of not having electricity will be less so. There’s no magical solution.”