Burying the wires isn’t the answer, says Fitzgibbon

Wednesday’s ice storm and the many outages it caused bring back the question of burying electrical wires.

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In an interview with TVA Nouvelles, Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon insisted that this very expensive option was not the answer.

“Are we going to put 100 billion for the global landfill in Quebec? The answer is no. It wouldn’t make sense because Hydro-Quebec already has $90 billion on its balance sheet. We should double the number of workers,” he says.

The Legault government refuses to consider such a scenario, which Hydro-Québec does not advocate, recalls Pierre Fitzgibbon.

“If we bury the network, when we go to fault detection, it will be very complicated,” explains the Minister of Economy.

The latter also indicates that about 10% of the network is already buried, mainly in the commercial and industrial sectors.

To watch the full interview, watch the video above.