Nearly 310,000 Hydro-Quebec customers were without power Thursday afternoon due to forest fires in northern Quebec. The state corporation hopes to be able to absorb everything by the start of the evening.
It may be raining in southern Quebec, but dozens of fires are still burning in the north.
The consequent smoke thus prevents the transmission of electricity on the very high voltage lines connecting the major production centers with the major urban centers.
“What isolates [ces lignes à haute tension], it’s the air”, explains Maxence Huard-Lefebvre, communications of Hydro-Quebec. “With this presence of dense smoke, there is an ionization phenomenon happening. Discharges will occur in these clouds of smoke. The lines will interpret a short circuit. We cannot keep the tension when this phenomenon occurs. »
This is followed by automatic load shedding in the less critical sectors of the Hydro-Québec network. Around 3:45 p.m., approximately 50,000 customers lacked power in Montreal, roughly the same number in Montérégie, 85,000 in the Laurentians, 60,000 in Laval, among others, for a total of 310,000 households without power across Quebec.
The return to normal could take between “three and four hours”, according to Hydro-Québec.
This kind of problem has happened a few times since the beginning of the forest fire season.
Last week, more than 200,000 Montreal households lost power during the heat wave. This time, it was an incident at a post in the west of the island that had been the cause of the load shedding.
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