No toaster, no coffee maker, no possibility of recharging your phone, with the school closed and the house getting colder on top of that: more than a million Hydro-Québec subscribers woke up without electricity , THURSDAY.
As you read these lines, several of them are still without power. With one question in mind: what will be the impact of such breakdowns when everything is electrified? When our cars, our heating systems, our factories will be even more dependent on the Hydro-Quebec network?
The question is all the more worrying since extreme weather events likely to disrupt the distribution of electricity are set to increase with climate change.
Should we therefore question the energy transition? Of course not. This is necessary because of the climate crisis, not to mention that reducing our dependence on oil will reduce capital flight from Quebec.
But the blackouts we are currently experiencing are nevertheless a warning signal that shows that we need to better prepare for this transition.
We see three ways to do this.
1) Consolidate the Hydro-Québec network.
2) Encourage municipalities to deploy emergency plans in the event of breakdowns.
3) Accelerate energy efficiency measures.
There are events against which even the strongest network cannot resist. According to Hydro-Quebec, this is the case of the ice that fell on Wednesday.
The fact remains that we know that the Hydro-Québec network is far too fragile. The Auditor General warned us last December. But there’s nothing like groping for a box of candles in a dark house to realize what the impacts may be…
Auditor found ‘marked decline in service reliability’1. Between 2012 and 2021, the number of outages jumped 16% in Quebec. Their duration has also increased.
In 2020, Hydro-Québec rolled out a plan to revamp its infrastructure. The costs, initially estimated at 800 million, have been revised to 1.3 billion. Except that it unfolds too slowly. In 2021, less than 60% of the hours planned to implement it have actually been carried out, according to the auditor.
As with the road network, it is tempting for authorities to announce new electrical works rather than maintain existing ones. On this subject, it was reassuring to hear on Friday the Minister of Economy, Innovation and Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon.
“We cannot just make new energy without investing massively in maintaining the network. Infrastructure maintenance is as strategic as new works,” the minister said at a press briefing.
Yes, maintaining and solidifying the electricity grid will be expensive. But as the Auditor General wrote, “an intervention that makes it possible to prevent a breakdown is generally less costly than a corrective intervention carried out during or after a breakdown”.
In some places, for example, it will be necessary to see whether the burying of power lines, although very costly, could in the long term prove profitable.
Hydro-Québec published its first climate change adaptation plan last fall, but it still has a lot of work ahead of it. Its president, Sophie Brochu, however, correctly pointed out on Friday that the state-owned company alone cannot ensure the resilience of all of society to power outages.
Municipalities, in particular, must think of places with safer electrical connections or generators where citizens can warm up, take a shower and recharge their cars.
Resilience to breakdowns ultimately depends on our residences themselves. We would be less vulnerable to power outages if our buildings were better insulated or, even better, passive (buildings with very low energy consumption that use, for example, solar or geothermal energy).
Hydro-Québec just announced this week that it wants to (finally!) raise its energy efficiency target, a step in the right direction.
Another solution involves the heat accumulators already marketed by Hydro-Québec. By storing heat to diffuse it later, these devices are designed to soften winter peaks. But they could also play a role during short-term power outages. Unfortunately, Hydro-Québec promotes it very little.
The power outages that just plunged us into darkness must have lights on our dashboard.