Understanding and preventing power outages

When the electricity goes off, what’s the reason?

There are three main reasons for your loss of power: a power outage; a planned service interruption for grid maintenance purposes; or an interruption requested by the emergency services.

When the electricity goes off without warning, that’s an outage. Precipitation, strong winds or even overly curious animals are among their many possible causes. Each outage is unique, but whatever the circumstances, rest assured that our teams will work round the clock to get your power up and running in the shortest possible time.

Then there’s maintenance work. Keeping the power system reliable and in good running order calls for regular maintenance—and to perform the work safely, we sometimes need to cut the power supply. We call this a planned service interruption. Don’t worry, these interruptions always feature on the map of scheduled interruptions and any affected customers are informed well in advance. That’s why it’s important to keep your phone number and email address up to date in your Customer Space.

Lastly, Hydro-Québec might sometimes be asked to cut the power in a given area by emergency responders like the fire department or the police. This is what we call an emergency interruption. Whatever the incident—fire, gas leak, flooding or something else—our priority is public safety. It’s important to remember that, in these situations, it’s not the grid that’s at fault. In other words, we’re still able to provide electricity service, but are required to interrupt it for reasons beyond our control. It’s also hard to predict when the service will be restored, since we have to wait for the emergency services to declare the situation safe and authorize us to turn the power back on.

Vidéo : Understanding what causes power outages