Hydro said to have a better network to cope with the ice

Photo courtesy Hydro-Quebec
Hydro-Québec has added towers fall to its network of power lines to limit the impacts of the ice storm.

Pierre Couture

Sunday, January 7, 2018 01:00

UPDATE
Sunday, January 7, 2018 01:00

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Hydro-Quebec argues that its network is more robust to face ice storms.

“The architecture of our network has been redesigned and strengthened to better cope with such weather events,” says the engineer Marie-Eve Grenier, Hydro-Québec.

20 years ago, between 4 and 10 January 1998, the network of Hydro-Quebec had, however, fallen in battle while more than 110 millimetres of ice had rained down on southern Quebec.

Result : more than 1.4 million subscribers have been deprived of electricity for several days in the most affected areas of Montreal, Montérégie, the Laurentians and the Outaouais region.

Subscribers have had to wait more than five weeks before being reconnected.

Photo courtesy Hydro-Quebec

The déglaceur of Levis cost $ 190 million to the Crown corporation. It allows you to deglaze the transmission lines on more than 380 km.

“With the same amount of ice would now be faster to restore power. It was an extreme storm that occurs only 400 years old, according to the odds “, says dr. Grenier.

Hydro-Quebec said to have invested more than $ 2 billion in the wake of the storm of 1998 to reconfigure the network into “loops” in order to better distribute the load and recover more quickly the current.

Best tower

For example, the State-owned company, which had seen thousands of poles, towers and conductors sag, one after the other under the weight of the ice, in 1998, said to have considerably enhanced its standards of construction.

“We have improved the mechanical resistance of our equipment. We inserted a pylon fall arrest protection in waterfall is very robust to all the 10 towers of a transmission line, ” says Ms. Grenier.

On the distribution network, Hydro-Quebec said to have also reinforced the poles and their anchors. The posts remain intact under heavy loads of ice and wind.

Hydro-Québec has also built from a new interconnection with the electrical system in Ontario, which allows you to have access to electric power quickly if the lines of the James bay and Côte-Nord suffer damage.

The crisis in figures

• 3000: the Number of poles destroyed during the great ice storm of 1998.

• $ 2 billion: Amount invested to strengthen the network of Hydro-Quebec after the great ice storm of 1998.

• $ 190 million: Amount invested in the project of the déglaceur in Lévis

• 34 272 kilometers: surface Area lines on the transmission network of Hydro-Québec in Québec