“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.
Again I ask, why are our transmission lines not underground?
Money.
Yes, but I mean… We still build sewer systems in Canadian cities on the Canadian Shield. I think it is fair to have the conversation as to why we cannot follow through with power transmission infrastructure as well. We all witnessed the effects of the 1998 ice storm. The fact that 27 years after that, things like this are still occurring is shameful.
This outage is effecting Montreal - one of our major population centers. I think if anything qualifies for Carney’s planned infrastructure investments, this ought to.
sewer systems
Is there some above-ground alternative? If it were, they would definitely build the sewage system in a cheap way, and Canadians would not only experience power outages but also dysentery.
I’m not suggesting we look into above-ground sewer systems. It just seems laughable to me, a person who has lived in a city centered on mines that can go 3 km into the earth (into that ‘impossible to build’ Canadian Shield), that we cannot spare some of that mining expertise to safely bury our power infrastructure and still leave adequate space in ready access tunnels to service it when required. We get the same kinds of severe weather that Quebec does. It’s stupid that we don’t plan ahead because it might cost more up front.
It’s like someone here said already … mines make investors rich. Sewers do not.
Well, I’m going to put forward a startup to some investors to create fertilizer from human waste, then. Companies like Synagro already do this shit.
Again I ask, why are our transmission lines not underground?
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.