A loss of production during a maintenance operation at the Churchill Falls power plant in Labrador left nearly half a million homes without power on Tuesday noon.
The outages are not concentrated in one place, affecting many neighborhoods. In Montreal, 140,000 homes were without power at the stroke of noon. A large part of Rosemont, Outremont, Griffintown and Côte-Saint-Luc, in particular, were plunged into darkness. On the South Shore, Longueuil, Brossard and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu were hard hit. In the north of the island, several districts of Laval also posted outages, as well as Terrebonne.
SCREENSHOT
Part of the outages in Montreal, as posted on the Hydro-Quebec website
In Quebec too, there were many breakdowns. In fact, one in five households in the capital was affected by a breakdown, that is to say nearly 88,000. The situation had however been restored there a little before 1 p.m.
In Quebec City, Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon told The Press that six turbine sets stopped working at Churchill Falls, causing outages. “It has nothing to do with computers, or with a hacker. Hydro does not yet have the reason why the turbine groups have ceased to operate. Power is being restored,” he said.
Jill Pitcher, spokesperson for Newfoundland & Labrador Hydro, notes that the outage occurred during turbine maintenance.
“During a maintenance operation this afternoon, a problem at Churchill Falls resulted in a loss of supply affecting customers in Quebec. All units are back in service. The incident is under investigation,” she said in an email to The Press.
Caroline Des Rosiers, spokesperson for Hydro-Québec, explains that it was a “drop in production” that affected the network around noon.
“There is an investigation underway. The protection mechanisms of the electricity transmission system reacted correctly, which meant that it caused outages. Currently, we are gradually recovering on the network. »
In a press release posted on Twitter, Hydro-Québec explains:
“The loss of production from certain turbine-generator sets at Churchill Falls generating station triggered protection mechanisms on our high-voltage transmission network, causing a power outage affecting approximately 490,000 customers across Quebec. Our teams are investigating the cause of this loss of production. We are already trying to restore service to affected customers by supplying them through other transmission lines. Please note that you do not have to report the breakdown via the Info-pannes service and that the deadlines estimated by Info-pannes are not applicable in a breakdown of this type since there is no question of work to be carried out here. on the distribution network. »
Mme Des Rosiers notes that the event does not seem to have been caused by one or more malicious people. “At the moment, there’s nothing pointing in that direction,” she said.
The outages started around noon.
The second largest underground power station in the world behind the Robert-Bourassa power station, the Churchill Falls power station is owned by a company 66% owned by Nalcor Energy, a provincial Crown corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador, and 34% by Hydro-Quebec.
The outage came less than a month after the major multi-day blackouts that affected southern Quebec in early April after an episode of freezing rain.