Hydro-Québec’s services are less and less reliable, and the Crown corporation is not ready to deal with the aging of its assets, notes the auditor general.
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Outages due to faulty equipment affected nearly 2 million Hydro-Québec customers in 2021, noted Auditor General Guylaine Leclerc in the December volume of her report for the year 2022-2023, tabled in the Assembly. national on Wednesday.
“The reliability of Hydro-Québec’s electricity distribution service shows a marked decline, and its outage reduction plan has only been partially implemented,” wrote the auditor.
Launched in 2020, this plan is in addition to the regular preventive work carried out by the government corporation. However, according to the Auditor General, this plan has significant “gaps”.
Initially, the implementation of the blackout reduction plan had been estimated at $800 million, but was reassessed at $1.14 billion in December 2021.
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“In addition, Hydro-Québec has not carried out a significant part of the work planned for 2021. In particular, only about a quarter of the work planned for this year has been carried out,” noted Ms. Leclerc.
“There is a possibility that the realization of this plan will take another ten years of delay,” added the auditor general during the presentation of her report.
Aging
Guylaine Leclerc also points out that Hydro-Québec will be faced with the aging of its assets, and that the number of equipment to be replaced “will continue to increase” over the next few years.
“However, the Crown corporation cannot confirm that its current practices will be sufficient to meet this challenge, and it has not adapted its strategy to the context of its aging assets,” wrote the auditor general.
“A more suitable strategy could, for example, prescribe the replacement of certain assets earlier than what is currently planned in order to mitigate the overload of work and the increase in breakdowns in the years to come,” she continued.
However, Ms. Leclerc notes that the state corporation “is not adequately equipped” to deal with the aging of its assets.
Photo Stevens LeBlanc
The Auditor General, Guylaine Leclerc
Hydro is “aware”
The Minister of Energy, Pierre Fitzgibbon, expressed that “maintaining infrastructure is important” and that Hydro-Québec is “aware” of the problems pointed out by the auditor general.
“It’s clear when we talk about network reliability, we talk about the aging of assets, prevention, you have to be very concerned about that. I think that in all three cases, there are measures that are taken,” he said.
For its part, Hydro-Québec assures that it is already at work to “improve the situation concerning all the points raised” in the Auditor General’s report.
The state corporation points out that 40% to 70% of breakdowns are caused by vegetation and that it has increased its investments in recent years in vegetation control activities, activities “unfortunately excluded from the audit of the auditor general,” lamented Hydro-Québec in a press release.
Moreover, Hydro-Québec acknowledges that its network has “reached the end of its useful life” and maintains that it has set up a “transversal team” which allows it to have an overview of the investments it must devote to the “sustainability of its assets” and the refinement of its prevention work.