Prepare to see more of Toronto’s dark side

Tuesday’s blackout was caused by a short circuit, but aging infrastructure means it’ll happen again

Tuesday’s blackout wasn’t the first and is likely not to be the last time parts of Toronto are plunged suddenly into darkness. With aging infrastructure handling an ever-increasing demand and just two entry points for the electricity powering Canada’s largest city, some observers say, power failures will continue unless the system improves. The cause in this case was determined to be a hydro pole with distribution lines that came into contact with a high-voltage overhead transmission line, which then “short-circuited,” said Mike Penstone, vice-president of network development and regional planning for Hydro One.

Just before 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, a full moon was the only source of light in some parts of west-end Toronto. Waiters brought out candles, elevators halted between floors and confused residents poked hopelessly at cellphones with dying batteries.

Subway riders between Jane and St. George stations were shuffled onto buses. Overhead images showed that wide swaths of the city — generally bounded by Mississauga, Yonge St., Lawrence Ave., Dupont St. and farther south — were in the dark.

A press release issued by Hydro One said that, as of 10:52 p.m., power had been restored to all 120,000 households affected and that the cause was under investigation.

For Josh Colle, councillor for Eglinton-Lawrence, which was in the blackout zone, it was: “Here we go again. I think that’s what everyone thought,” he told the Star.

It was less than four months ago that 300,000 homes and businesses across Toronto were without power, in some cases for weeks, after heavy, ice-covered branches brought down hundreds of power lines, requiring painstaking work by Toronto Hydro and workers brought in from other jurisdictions to reconnect them.

Last July, 300,000 customers also went without power after a major summer storm flooded roads and basements, including Hydro One’s Manby transformer station in Etobicoke, which had to be pumped out.

“It shows you how delicate or fragile our system is, that when one little link in the chain goes down, my whole ward was down and seemingly half the city,” said Colle, who also sits on the board of Toronto Hydro.

More modern and reliable equipment would better handle the unpredictable weather brought by climate change, he said. Natural catastrophes are expected to sap $5 billion from the economy by 2020, according to a recent report from TD.

Toronto Hydro needs “many many billions,” Colle said. It would have to increase rates to raise the money and get approval from the Ontario Energy Board.

The city accesses the provincial power supply from two stations: the west-end Manby station and the east-end Leaside station. Manby failed on Tuesday, meaning there was no power to distribute, similar to tripping a breaker in a home but affecting thousands of people, said Toronto Hydro spokeswoman Tanya Bruckmueller-Wilson.

Hydro One says neither aging equipment nor the small number of access points to the grid was responsible for the most recent outage.

Why the two lines that short-circuited Tuesday night were so close together remains under investigation, Hydro One’s Penstone said. The transmission lines have been in place for more than 60 years. The poles were installed last month by Toronto Hydro as part of an attempt to upgrade old wires.

Many Torontonians are simply getting used to the blackouts.

“We don’t know when it’s going to happen, and it seems like something that just keeps happening,” said Crystal Gibson, who said she was reminded of childhood visits to Guyana, where rolling blackouts were common.

A $350-billion investment is required over the next 20 years just to maintain the level of reliability in the power system across the country, according to the Conference Board of Canada.

Still, “we’re not blackout city,” said Dan McGillivray, executive director of Ryerson University’s Centre for Urban Energy. “The lights are on and the city operates. But things fail.”

“Here you have a city of how many millions of people basically sitting at either end of a very interesting extension cord,” McGillivray said. If there’s a problem at one end, “you get chunks of the city in the dark.”

Intense growth in the core further places a strain on the grid, McGillivray said. With scores of skyscrapers under construction, it’s the equivalent of several small towns in terms of energy demand.

Toronto Hydro’s most recent project is the new $184-million transformer station on Bremner Blvd. downtown, which backs up another, aging one. Without it, demand would have outpaced supply by 2017.

Before construction, Toronto Hydro warned that an equipment failure in the core could cut power for days or weeks.