About 11,000 Hydro-Québec customers still without power a week after the winter storm
MONTREAL – Hydro-Quebec says more than 10,700 customers are still without power a week after a major winter storm knocked out transmission lines across the province.
The utility says power is still out for more than 3,300 customers in the Quebec City region, about 2,800 customers in the Laurentians region and for about 1,200 customers in the Outaouais region.
Hydro-Quebec said it could not provide an end date for all outages.
The storm that brought wind, freezing rain and snow hit Quebec City on December 23 and, at its peak, knocked out power to more than 350,000 customers.
Normand Mousseau, scientific director of Polytechnique Montreal’s Trottier Energy Institute, said Wednesday that the extended outages are a sign that Quebec’s grid is fragile and that the province is unprepared for its move away from fossil fuels.
An auditor general’s report released in December found that Hydro-Québec’s service has become less reliable and the provincial crown corporation is not fully equipped to meet the challenges associated with an aging network.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on December 29, 2022.
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