Extreme weather, turbocharged by a changing climate, threatens to make your electrical service less reliable and more expensive. Inside the battle to stop that from happening
When power lines meet ferocious gales, accumulating ice or falling trees, something’s gotta give. Often, it’s the humble wooden utility pole, which snaps like a matchstick.. Hydro One reported 1,900 broken poles – a corporate record. Ottawa Hydro lost more than 400, along with several kilometres of power lines. Hydro-Québec replaced 1,125 poles, along with 400 transformers and 40 km of electric cable.
underground, but the first segments of wire proved defective; one of his partners suggested the quickest and cheapest way to complete the project would be to string wire overhead on wooden poles. North America’s leading manufacturer of wooden utility poles, Montreal-based Stella-Jones Inc., supplies all of the continent’s major electrical utilities. The company makes more than one million poles each year at facilities in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia, and throughout the United StatesThe company’s utility pole sales have more than doubled since 2013.
A small competitor to Stella-Jones, Calgary-based RS Technologies Inc., smells opportunity. The scent is reminiscent of a freshly snapped wooden pole. Composite poles were “an order of magnitude more expensive” than wooden ones three years ago, Mr. Kirby said, but the price gap has narrowed considerably. And composite poles are lighter and can be assembled on site from segments nested together, so more can be shipped on the same truck.
Some North American utilities use concrete or steel poles. Hydro One still predominantly uses wood, but lately has deployed composites in swampy areas, ones where woodpeckers are active and in remote areas where the lower weight makes composite poles much easier to install. Hydro crews work to restore power in Clarence-Rockland, Ont., where a state of emergency was in place on May 26, 2022, a week after severe thunderstorms swept through Ontario and Quebec.At EPRI’s Lenox Laboratory in Massachusetts, the institute is examining how to give the venerable wooden pole a new lease on life. The facility is essentially one giant torture chamber for electrical components.
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