Montreal power outages (6/6): Hydro-Québec should continue to engage with customers on power security

Recommendations

Hydro-Québec should continue to improve their communication with customers, allowing customers understand the status of specific elements of grid infrastructure. They should continue in their efforts to make the grid more resilient which could include working with local city councils to co-ordinate efforts. Hydro-Québec should recognize that customer-generators have quite different perspectives to other customers and services should be tailored accordingly. One area Hydro-Québec should explore with customer-generators is about how vehicle-to-grid (V2G) bidirectional charging might be employed.

Detailed Commentary

Speaking with Hydro-Québec?about our local power grid

Before the Ice Storm I really did not give much thought to the state of our power grid. No longer! I now look at the electricity poles around our home and think how vulnerable many of them look, with the poles shown in the photo I took on November 23 2023 being a prime example. The state of our electricity grid makes me think about the risks to our home and how exposed we are to financial liabilities.

Hydro-Québec is well aware of the vulnerability of the electrical infrastructure to extreme weather events, which they describe in their Climate Change Adaption Plan 2022-2024. They also say that “barring gross or intentional fault”, Hydro-Québec is NOT liable for damages. Specifically, “Hydro Québec?cannot be held liable for damages (for) a meteorological event (e.g. storm).” “We strongly advise you to contact your insurer in a case such as this.” Given that the liabilities rests with homeowners, and my specific concerns about the local electricity poles, I wanted to share my November 23 photo with Hydro-Québec. I was also interested to see if the process of communicating with Hydro-Québec has improved over the last 8 years. Back in 2015 I was told by our tree maintenance company that only Hydro-Québec are allowed to cut the young trees growing next to electricity lines close to our home. Despite my best efforts I was NOT able to establish contact with Hydro-Québec about this! As part of Hydro-Québec’s online form I was asked “Who owns the tree?” which had this note “if the risk is not imminent, we remind you that only the tree’s owner can request pruning. The requestor must cover these costs.” In this event, I could NOT get the neighbour to do anything about it (who has since moved away) and nothing happened.

I am glad to say that the process of alerting Hydro-Québec has improved. On November 23 2023 I was able to send my photo, along with a summary of my concerns, to Hydro-Québec. This was logged in our Hydro-Québec Customer Space under the ‘Track a request’ tab.

My request led to a visit from a very engaging Hydro-Québec representative in mid-December 2023. It was NOT difficult to express our concern about flooding as our meeting took place after we had experienced a major rainstorm the night before. It was part of a weather event which caused widespread flooding and power outages in the US North-East. We reviewed the poles together (as shown in the photo) and he answered my questions about them. He explained that these poles which carry our electricity lines are also used to carry communication lines (as well as street lighting and signs for our bus service!). The communications lines are the three lower lines whilst above that are the Hydro-Québec power lines. So, if this support pole fell over, for whatever reason, we would not only lose our mains electricity but also our home phone line/internet/TV with Videotron. The original support pole, on the left with the cut section at the base, is owned by Bell. The new pole, to the right was erected in 2020, and attached to the original pole using metal connecting rods. The man from Hydro-Québec assured me that these poles were secure, although he said he was a little surprised that the power lines have not yet been transferred to the new pole.

Following our meeting I noticed that it is standard practice for when a new pole is attached to an older pole, that the older pole has its base cut in this way, presumably to minimize horizontal stresses between the poles. What would need to happen is for the lines to be transferred to the new pole and the old pole taken down. If all poles were owned by Hydro-Québec this might all happen in a single day (as I observed in January 2024 with another pole in our neighbourhood). In summary, it seems that the ongoing coupling of the two poles shown in the photo of November 23 2023 was intended to be a short-term fix which require co-ordination between Bell and Hydro-Québec to complete the transfer to the new pole.

After the pole inspection I had a more casual conversation with the Hydro-Québec representative. He spoke about the challenges they were facing upgrading an ageing grid, especially in the context of a changing climate. He thought that people should be prepared for power outages, even in the cities which have tended not to suffer from outages as much as people living out-of-town. In his opinion, this means that homeowners should get a generator! In the context of our friendly conversation, given the level of public annoyance about the power outages, he did mention that he has been getting quite a lot of negative reactions from people if he tells them he works for Hydro-Québec. I hope we reassured him by saying how grateful we are to him and his colleagues for their extraordinary work. After a major outage, the Hydro-Québec field teams work at all times of day and night, often in very harsh wintery conditions, to restore power to the people of Quebec.

The good news is that on April 9 2024, Hydro-Québec transferred the power lines to the new pole (see photo). This means that if the older support pole fell over, we should NOT now lose our mains electricity! I believe to complete the process, Bell now needs to transfer the communications lines to the new pole and then the old pole could be taken down. In May 2024 they also made upgrades to the pole in our back garden, which the Hydro-Québec representative had also reviewed in his visit in December 2023. Whether either of these actions by Hydro-Québec happened as a direct consequence of our meeting in December 2023 is not something, I believe, I would be able to know. It would be good if Hydro-Québec could enable customers to track such actions.

Hydro-Québec considers resilience to be a shared responsibility; citizens should be prepared for outages of up to 3 days

Hydro-Québec is a Canadian Crown corporation owned by the provincial government of Quebec. Over the years, Quebecers have benefitted from very low electricity prices – the lowest in Canada and North America – with electricity generated mainly from vast hydro electricity resources. Yet goodwill about cheap electricity prices has dwindled given public frustration about the frequent power outages in 2023.

After the Ice Storm in mid-May 2023, Hydro-Québec issued a press release outlining their actions to increase system resilience, including the consideration of undergrounding and much more resilient composite poles. A couple of comments that were made in the press release caught my eye:

• They make the point that “resilience (is) a shared responsibility, citizens should also ensure they have an emergency kit at home with three days’ worth of essential supplies, as recommended by the Québec government.” I find this a very interesting comment with profound implications. I had not realized before that Hydro-Québec is saying to citizens that they should prepare for outages of up to three days.
• They also provided statistics about their work, including that “Service restored to 77% of homes 48 hours after the height of the storm”. These statistics do NOT seem to be close to the experience of citizens from Beaconsfield. It prompts me to think that Hydro-Québec should make available historical data about outages for Beaconsfield and any other specific geographical location. It would also be interesting to know what proportion of customers were still without power after three days in all the different regions of Quebec. This would help validate whether the guideline for three days emergency supplies are reasonable and whether there are some regions which are more at risk than others.

Also in mid-May 2023, a report from IEDM suggested that Hydro-Québec faces a power shortfall by as early as 2027. In August 2023, Hydro-Québec appointed Michael Sabia as their new President and Chief Executive Officer. He announced an aggressive growth plan in November with an investment of at least $90 billion over the next decade. Within the context of this growth plan, the Quebec premier reassured Quebecers that the price of electricity would not increase by more than 3% per year. In early 2024, Hydro-Québec are undertaking an extensive dialogue phase with stakeholders concerning this 2035 action plan.

Hydro-Québec currently has a particular challenge during winter peaks with two offers for consumers to help – dynamic pricing and the Hilo smart home system.

Solar battery opportunities for Hydro-Québec

Hydro-Québec claim to be supportive of solar ‘customer generators’ and offer a net metering offer where customers would get a credit for power exported to the grid to be used within 24 months (see page 11 of pdf). There are a number of steps to adopting this arrangement, including a fee of $400 (see page 8 of pdf) as part of the process of setting up a dual-register meter.

These are still early days for how Hydro-Québec supports ‘customer generators’, and here are my suggestions for how they could develop their offer.

• For many solar battery ‘customer generators’ it would be unrealistic to get pay back for the $400 connection fee. For these customers it would make more financial sense to store solar generated electricity on the home battery during the day and consume over the 24-hour daily cycle rather than pay to set-up this net metering arrangement. For ourselves I would estimate that we are going to export around 50 to 100 kWh per year (worth $5 to $10). My recommendation would be for Hydro-Québec to reconsider this set-up fee if they wanted to encourage net metering.
• Hydro-Québec should offer a dedicated online space and contact support lines for ‘customer generators’. Earlier this year I called the Hydro-Québec general contact number and there was no-one there who could help me with my queries about the net metering options.
• Where Hydro-Québec could usefully engage customers with solar battery technology is how best to use them during winter peak events and with the Rate Flex D tariff. Communication to these customers could include discussion that, for these short periods of time, there is actually no need to avoid using energy-hungry appliances during these peak events when running off battery.
• My hypothesis is that the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionality of bidirectional charging would have considerable value in Quebec. I base this on the assumption that currently EVs are contributing significantly to the high demand for electricity during winter peak times. Range reduces considerably when the car battery is very cold and I have noticed some long queues at charging stations during these times. Certainly Hydro-Québec is considering how to manage the demand for the growing number of electric cars in Quebec and are exploring whether to incentivize EV car owners to charge their cars outside of peak consumption periods. Yet could they go further? Could Hydro-Québec use V2G bidirectional technology to pay EV car owners for electricity during these peak events? Could Hydro-Québec learn from an initiative announced by Wallbox and Bidirectional Energy in California where consumers are estimated to be able to earn over $1,000 every year “when combined with utility Demand Response programs and time-of-use utility rates”?

Link back to Montreal Power Outages summary.