“Hundreds of thousands of households are without power Tuesday morning across Quebec after a first night of relentless snowfall brought as much as 35 centimeters of snow to parts of the province. Some school boards are asking that students stay at home.”
Again I ask, why are our transmission lines not underground? Is it because it is too difficult to dig into the Canadian Shield or something? I live in Sudbury, so I am not one of the effected, but it seems bad that deep into the 21st century we can still have power outages like this that impact so many of our citizens.
Politics and costs.
Since HQ is Québec government cash cow, and publicly owned. The elected government dictates how much it wants from the company and therefore how much it can reinvest into the maintenance and upgrades of the entire production and transmission divisions.
That’s how Gentilly-2 got shut down by PQ. How a few windmill project with assured returns were awarded to the Liberal main lobbying group Power Corp. Or how lately the CAQ is forcing law to bypass environmental review for new windmills project awarded to their donators while removing R&D.
All while continuing to restrict maintenance budget and removing burying lines budget in the late 80’s.
They will however pay for it when its a transmission line in the US.