We rarely find real solutions by burying our problems. But for Hydro-Québec, this is the way to go. Burying electrical wires in the ground would reduce outages that plunge customers into darkness at the slightest whim of the weather.
Monday was no exception. The first surge of the year left more than 110,000 homes without electricity. However, around thirty centimeters of snow is nothing very surprising in Quebec.
But as the Hydro-Québec network lacks maintenance, it has become vulnerable to bad weather, which is becoming more and more frequent and violent with climate change.
The derecho of May 2022: 500,000 customers affected. The storm just before Christmas: 640,000 homes in the cold. The ice storm last April: more than 1 million Quebecers without power, some for up to five days.
Hydro-Québec must therefore improve the resilience of its distribution network, especially since the energy transition will make us even more dependent on electricity.
In the short term, better pruning is the simplest solution to reducing outages, as vegetation growing through electrical wires is a major source of the problem. Deploying powerful battery backups in neighborhoods can also help.
But to make our network more robust, burial remains essential.
Obviously, this is not cheap.
A kilometer of buried network can cost up to a million dollars, or ten times more expensive than a kilometer of overhead network, estimates Hydro-Québec. This is what allowed Prime Minister François Legault to assert that it would cost $100 billion to bury all of Quebec’s wires.
We agree that such a bill is not reasonable. Except that no one is calling for the burying of all the electrical wires in the province, from Manic 5 to Montreal, passing through each of the ranks of Quebec.
To reduce the bill, we could go gradually, targeting the most densely populated areas, where outages affect a very large number of citizens. And we could start by burying the high voltage lines, without redoing all the low voltage lines that enter customers’ homes. That would already be a good start.
Other techniques can also reduce costs. Hydro-Québec has carried out two pilot projects for this purpose over the past year and a half.
Burial should also be required when constructing new buildings and digging up streets for other reasons.
It is sad that the City of Montreal has redone its sewers and water pipes for years, without Hydro-Québec taking advantage of this golden opportunity to install underground electrical lines. Fortunately, an agreement to this effect was reached in 2022.
But Hydro-Québec cannot do the same in other municipalities, because it must concentrate on connection requests that drag on for new homes.
We understand. But in the meantime, the existing network suffers.
The reliability of Hydro-Québec’s distribution service has deteriorated markedly over the past 10 years, the general auditor noted in a performance audit last December.1
In 2021, more than eight million customers were affected by an outage. The average duration of these outages increased by 63% from 2012 to 2021. And these figures don’t even take into account outages due to major weather events.
Everything indicates that the situation will worsen in the coming years, due to the aging of Hydro-Québec equipment which will accelerate.
To give you an idea, the number of poles to be replaced will increase from approximately 7,000 per year to 30,000 by 2035. And the number of overhead transformers to be replaced will increase from 8,500 to 14,000 per year.
All the more reason to consider burying it, instead of doing everything the same way. We are at a pivotal moment. Let’s take this opportunity to think differently.
At least, the number one priority of the 2035 Action Plan tabled by the new boss of Hydro-Québec, Michael Sabia, plans to double the sums devoted to improving the reliability of infrastructure, to invest from 4 to 5 billion per year.
So much the better.
With the energy transition, Quebec will be much more dependent on electricity, not only for the home, but also for the car. The battery industry is all well and good. But you still have to be able to recharge it, rain or shine.
The position of The Press
The energy transition cannot be achieved with a network that is constantly breaking down. Burying more electricity wires would improve Hydro-Québec’s reliability.